Portrait of a Saami girl

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of a young Saami girl, aged three years old, standing, wearing a cap and tunic.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: 3 September 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Lake Inari
Cultural group: European Saami
Format: Drawing (mounted on card)
Size: 94 x 74 mm; 245 x 173 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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Exhibition label: ‘Portrait of a Saami girl. “This is a delightful little family”, Arthur Evans wrote of his hosts at Lake Inari in Finnish Lapland. “There is a little girl of 3 in a Lapp cap & blue tunic with the usual blue stripes about it; & a little boy of 5 who recited his A.B.C. for our edification. The children both have flaxen hair & blueish eyes, as among Finns & Swedes.”’ Source: ‘Travels in Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Collection of Sir Arthur Evans’, exhibition curated by Philip Grover, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 29 April to 1 September 2013.

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: ‘Fiskare Lapp - little girl/ On Lake Enare’ (written in pencil below drawing). Annotations on mount: ‘Fisher Lapp - (little girl)/ Coast 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 3 September 1873, when his  travelling party was at Lake Inari. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘This is a delightful little family. There is a little girl of 3 in a Lapp cap & blue tunic with the usual blue stripes about it - & a little boy of 5 who recited his A.B.C. for our edification [-] the children both have flaxen hair & blueish eyes, as among Finns and Swedes - the father light brown hair - the mother more Lappish - these fisher Lapps show very transitional types between Lapp & Finn’ (entry dated 3 September 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 2, p.78. 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.