Interior of a Finnish house

Commentary
Interior of a Finnish house
Accession number: 
1941.8.83
Collection: 
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Reproduction photograph by the Henry Taunt studio of a drawing by Arthur Evans showing the interior of a Finnish cottage, with a stone fireplace and oven projecting into the room.

Photographer: Henry William Taunt studio (Oxford, England), labelled ‘Henry W. Taunt & Co.’, after an original drawing [1941.8.91] by Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: Circa 1870s; 24 August 1873 (original drawing)
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland | United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Region/Place: Lapland; Kitinen river; Niemela
Cultural group: European Finnish
Format: Cabinet card
Size: 108 x 164 mm
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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Exhibition label: ‘One of two cabinet cards by Henry W. Taunt & Co. which reproduce original drawings by Arthur Evans. The images show a Saami fishing settlement on the shore of Lake Hammasjarvi; and the inside of a house – with a “[s]tone fireplace & oven built out into [the] middle of the room” – where his party sheltered a night on the Kitinen river.’ Source: ‘Travels in Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina: An Ethnographic Collection of Sir Arthur Evans’, exhibition curated by Philip Grover, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 29 April to 1 September 2013.

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 [1941.8.91] 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.