Saami cradle

Reproduction photograph by the Henry Taunt studio of a drawing by Arthur Evans showing a Saami child in a cradle suspended from a beam.

Photographer: Henry William Taunt studio (Oxford, England), labelled ‘Henry W. Taunt & Co.’, after an original drawing [1941.8.90] by Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: Circa 1870s; 11 September 1873 (original drawing)
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland | United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Region/Place: Lapland; Armonjarvi
Cultural group: European Saami
Format: Cabinet card
Size: 164 x 108 mm
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] 6 photographs of pencil sketches, Lappland, mounted on cards’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590.

Research notes: It has been identified by Philip Grover that this photographic print by the Henry Taunt studio (‘Henry W. Taunt & Co.’) reproduces an original drawing [1941.8.90] by Arthur John Evans, made during a visit to Finland in 1873. Henry William Taunt (1842–1922) established a shop at 33 Cornmarket Street, Oxford, in 1869, before moving to larger premises at 9–10 Broad Street in 1874 (closed 1895), while from 1889 also running his photographic business from a house, which he called Rivera (after the River Thames), on Cowley Road: Malcolm Graham, ‘Taunt, Henry William (1842–1922)’, in H. C. G. Mathew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004), volume 53, pp.834–835. 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.