Drawing of Lake Hammasjarvi

Drawing in pencil by Arthur Evans of Lake Hammasjarvi and the surrounding hills.

Artist: Arthur John Evans
Date of drawing: 30 August 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Hammasjarvi
Format: Drawing (mounted on card)
Size: 74 x 122 mm; 173 x 246 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] 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: ‘Hammasjärvi’ (written in pencil below drawing). Annotations on mount: ‘Hammasjärvi (“Tooth-lake”) from hills to the South of it/ - called Hammastunturi + Tooth Mountain -/ The Fells are bare, but the lowlands round the/ Lake are covered, as elsewhere, with forest. - In Enare Lappmark -’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this drawing was made by Arthur Evans on 30 August 1873, when his travelling party was at Hammasjarvi. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘From here we made our way over the broad undulating table land of the range we were on, called as a whole, “Hummastunturi” [Hammastunturi] - the tooth mountain - & I saw two tame reindeer for the first time - We passed here & there bogs covered with cloudberry, mostly over, & the leaves the colour of a Virginian creeper [...] As we neared the edge of the plateau, the lake of Hammasjärvi [Hammasjarvi], on whose banks the Lapp station we were bound for is situated - appeared below backed by range after range of low mountains - whose blue & slate coloured shadows kept shifting & changing as fleecy clouds swept between them & the sky’ (entry dated 30 August 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 2, p.45. 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.