Finnish boatmen

Portrait of two Finnish men, boatmen hired by Arthur Evans’ travelling party on the Ivalo river.

Photographer: Arthur John Evans
Date of photograph: 4 September 1873
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Northern Europe
Country: Finland
Region/Place: Lapland; Ivalo river
Cultural group: European Finnish
Format: Black and white print (mounted on card)
Size: 73 x 88 mm; 174 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] 13 photographs mounted on cards. Types & scenery in Lappland. Finland, Sweden. Taken on journey in 1873’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. Annotations on mount: ‘Finns of Kyroe, Enare  Lappmark./ Our boat-men on the Ivalojoki’ (written on mount in brown ink).

Research notes: It has been established by Philip Grover that this photograph was taken by Arthur Evans on 4 September 1873, when his party was travelling along the Ivalo river. Evans wrote in his journal of the voyage to Finnish Lapland: ‘From this place which is called Mikhola, we got a boat up the Ivalo river, at one spot passing some most transcending autumnal bits, which in their full effect could I think hardly be found out of this country’ (entry dated 4 September 1873): Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans Archive, B/2/1, Box 1, Notebook 2, p.86. 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.