Drawing of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Uppsala

Commentary

Drawing of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Uppsala
Accession number: 
1941.8.102
Collection: 
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of buildings in Uppsala, with an old brick house in the foreground and the fourteenth-century Church of the Holy Trinity in the distance.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: 7 August 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Sweden
Region/Place: Uppsala; Uppsala
Cultural group: European Swedish
Format: Drawing (mounted on card)
Size: 74 x 94 mm; 173 x 245 mm (with mount)
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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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] 5 original pencil sketches of Sweden. Made on journey in 1873. Mounted’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. Annotations on mount: ‘Old house & Church at Upsala/ SWEDEN’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this drawing was made by Arthur Evans on 7 August 1873, when his travelling party was at Uppsala. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘[I]t is time to despair of seeing any really old Swedish streets - those here are only Stockholm on a small scale, & mostly built of wood painted & stuccoed[.] I suppose that the houses being of wood have to be perpetually rebuilt & so keep pace with the times - there was one old brick one with a 17th century date on it & a very peaked roof which comforted me a little as we got near the old red brick cathedral’ (entry dated 7 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 1, pp.21–22. 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.