A PAINTING of a cannibal feast that caused a sensation when it was exhibited has resurfaced more than a century after it shocked Victorian Britain.

Charles Gordon Frazer painted Cannibal Feast to provide an insight into the cannibal civilisations he feared were on the brink of extinction after witnessing the feast while hiding in long grass.

He was one of the few white men to have seen and survived such rituals and the only one known to have provided a first-hand pictorial record of the ceremony. When the painting was put on display at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1895 it astonished, fascinated and horrified Victorian society in almost equal measure.

Frazer saw the celebratory feast on the island of Tanna during an expedition to explore the New Hebrides in the Pacific. Guided by locals, he headed into the jungle. Warriors had just returned from a war with a neighbouring tribe and were celebrating by eating the bodies of the fallen and captives taken during the fighting. Rather than risk joining the menu by introducing himself he hid in undergrowth to watch and was later able to reproduce the scene.

Frazer told contemporaries: “What I have tried to illustrate in the picture I saw with my own eyes at the moment of our departure and have faithfully reproduced every detail. The procession was slowly carrying in their victims on poles. Two victims I saw, but I was told there were more.

“At length all the men sat down, two men standing in the centre with clubs and a procession is formed midst savage chants. Then the human captives are carried round suspended from poles while the details relating to their capture are excitedly elaborated. Madly and frantically, the savages dance, while they defame and disgrace by gesture and voice their helpless captives, who afterwards are dragged to the fires to form the nucleus of a prolonged feast.”

He said that the islanders believed that by eating their enemies they would imbibe their strength. Frazer went on to describe how the preferred cooking technique of the “wild people” was to bake their enemies in an oven created by digging a hollow in the ground and lining it with stones.

“Banana leaves are then placed over the stones,” he said. “Over the leaves a layer of smashed up bananas or yams (very often both) are spread, and into this the body is placed, and in its turn plastered over with the same concoction, over which more leaves are placed — the ashes and warm charcoal heaped and the oven is left to cook.” He had recorded the feast “from the fact of having by accident witnessed . . . a scene of superstition so ancient, a custom that must soon become extinct all over the world that I considered it my duty to illustrate this dark and terrible phase.”

The artist, born in 1863 in Hampstead, studied at St John’s Wood School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools before embarking for the South Pacific in 1885.

Frazer’s painting and the report he made are to be auctioned by Bonhams in London on November 2. Cannibal Feast is estimated to fetch £25,000 to £35,000.

Giles Peppiatt, of Bonhams, said: “I have never seen a picture like this. It is unique.”

Frazer died in 1899 of blackwater fever after travelling to Siam, now Thailand, having been commissioned to paint portraits of the royal family.

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