Pitt Rivers Museum, east end of the Court (glass negative)

Commentary

Pitt Rivers Museum, east end of the Court (glass negative)
Accession number: 
1999.19.3
Collection: 
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum, taken towards the east end of the Court, showing the lower part of the Haida totem pole (‘Star House Pole’).

Photographer: Alfred Robinson
Date of photograph: 1901
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Region/Place: England; Oxfordshire; Oxford
Cultural group: Haida
Format: Glass plate negative (‘dry plate’)
Size: 216 x 165 mm (‘full-plate’)
Acquisition: Internal accession

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Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken in 1901, very shortly after the installation of the Haida totem pole (‘Star House Pole’) in the Pitt Rivers Museum. The exact date of the totem pole being put up in the Museum is not known, but one can deduce that it was in position by the time Professor Edward Burnett Tylor gave a lecture on ‘Totems and Totemism’ on 22 November 1901, as reported in the Oxford Magazine, 20 (27 November 1901), pp.108–109. Another photograph of the totem pole – clearly taken at the same time as this – was reproduced in Tylor’s article on the Haida totem pole, published shortly afterwards in the journal Man, and from this one can be certain that both photographs were taken in 1901 specifically to record the totem pole in its new location: E. B. Tylor, ‘Note on the Haida Totem-Post Lately Erected in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Man: A Monthly Record of Anthropological Science, 2 (1902), pp.1–3. A print of this photograph was very likely one of the two which were sent by Tylor to Robert Hanley Hall in recognition of his help in securing the pole for the Museum. Hall replied to Tylor in February 1902: ‘I am much pleased to receive the two handsome photographs of the Totem Pole as it now stands in the Museum, and I will prize them very much’: Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Tylor Papers, Box 12, Item 26 (H5): letter from R. H. Hall to E. B. Tylor, 15 February 1902.