Drawing of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Uppsala

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.