Drawing of Johanninpoika Marataja

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of a Saami man (named Johanninpoika Marataja), a local guide hired by Evans’ travelling party, portrayed on the shore of Lake Inari.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: 1 September 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Lake Inari
Cultural group: European Saami
Named person(s): Johanninpoika Marataja
Format: Drawing (mounted on card)
Size: 112 x 74 mm; 245 x 173 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

***

Primary documentation: ‘[p.588] Dr. JOAN EVANS, from the property of the late SIR ARTHUR EVANS, Youlbury, Boars Hill, Oxford. [List of items follows]’; ‘[p.590] 15 original pencil sketches of types & scenery, chiefly round ENARE, LAPPMARK, FINLAND. Made on journey in 1873. Mounted’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. Annotations on drawing: ‘The grand irreclaimable’ (written in pencil below drawing). Annotations on mount: ‘Our Lapp guide Johanninpoika Marataja/ On the shore of Lake Enare’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this drawing was made by Arthur Evans on 1 September 1873, when his  travelling party was at Lake Inari. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘his [Johanninpoika Marataja’s] general rig is not very unlike a Wallach[’]s - leather belt, coarse sack cloth tunic but with a high collar of divers[e] colours [...] & which is the distinguishing feature of the Lapp tunic - his legs closely swathed in the same ragged sacking - dull bands wound about above the boot which is like the Finnish saba, but only up to the ankle - From his belt hangs a very long knife in leather sheath’ (entry dated 1 September 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 2, pp.59–60. For more information on Arthur Evans’ voyage to Finnish Lapland in 1873, see Joan Evans, Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and His Forebears (London, 1943), pp.172–176; Ann Brown, Before Knossos...: Arthur Evans’s Travels in the Balkans and Crete (Oxford, 1993), pp.14–16, 90; and Tony Lurcock, No Particular Hurry: British Travellers in Finland, 1830-1917 (London, 2013), pp.123–134, 250.