Kanak Art: A Lifelong Passion

With a single exception, the 34 works collected by Jacques C. have never come up for auction. For nearly 50 years, Mr. C., who had a passionate interest in Kanak culture and died in 2018, sought out these artifacts around the world. Like his ancestors, he had a profound affection for New Caledonia. Three generations before him, in 1852, two brothers, Timothée and Hippolyte C., left their native Normandy for Australia to open a restaurant in Sydney, Le Café Français. In 1861, Timothée married a young Irishwoman and bought 1,500 hectares (some 3706.5 acres) of land in New Caledonia, which had become a French territory eight years earlier. In July 1862 he and his family disembarked from La Gazelle , specially chartered for the voyage, and settled on that land to grow sugar cane. His brother joined him in 1866. Their descendant, Jacques C, was an interior designer in Nouméa and a shareholder in a contemporary art gallery in Paris who remained attached to New Caledonia, even becoming vice-president of the Société d’Etudes Historiques…