Drawing of the church at Piteå

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of the seventeenth-century wooden Lutheran church and belfry at Piteå.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: 13 August 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Sweden
Region/Place: Norbotten; Piteå
Cultural group: European Swedish
Format: Drawing (mounted on card)
Size: 74 x 93 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 drawing: ‘Piteå’ (written in pencil below drawing). Annotations on mount: ‘Wooden Church & Belfry (Lutheran)/ PITEÅ. Vesterbotten. 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 13 August 1873, when his travelling party was at Piteå. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘At 6 p.m. reached Piteå a little wooden town up a river of the same name [...] The wooden church has a belfry separate from it - & both constructions are the oddest; in the church yard crosses of iron & wood painted black with a dove carved on top - Here at least they have no long winded epitaphs simply “föd - död” “born & died” - date - & perhaps a short text’ (entry dated 4 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 1, pp.48, 49. 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.