Footnotes

Provenance:
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 4 June 1996, lot 100

Exhibited:
Hohenberg an der Eger, Porzellanikon - Staatliches Museum für Porzellan, 2018-2023

The drum held by the witch is a direct copy of a Sámi ceremonial drum that was given to the Elector of Saxony, Johann Georg II, on 28th March 1668 by Kristian Albrekt, Duke of Holstein (1641-1695), on the occasion of the latter's visit to Dresden. These drums, decorated with runes whose meaning was known only to the shaman (known as "noaidi" in the Sámi language), were activated during healing ceremonies in conjunction with a T-shaped drumstick that is missing from the present example's right hand but visible on a 19th-century example (fig. 1). The drum is now in the collection of the Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, inv. no. F 2016-3/1556.

The drum was most likely one of many confiscated during the first third of the 17th century by missionaries seeking to covert the Sámi of Norway to Christianity. Only about 70-75 drums survived this process and were brought to Copenhagen in the royal Kunstkammer and the missionary college. The drum made its way to Holstein due to familial relations with the Swedish court (Kristian Albrekt was the brother of Queen Hedwig Eleonora of Sweden) and thence to Dresden, where it was presented to the Elector along with a two-part painting titled "Dis sint de sitten von Laplant" [These are the customs of Lapland], presumably as a means of explaining the gift. The drum (and painting) are recorded in the inventories of the "Indianische Cammer" in 1684, 1710, 1716, 1783 (by which time the bone clapper had been lost) and 1821. In 1838, it was recorded (without the painting) in the inventory of the "Türkenzelt" [Turkish Tent]; in 1838 it became part of the Historical Museum of the royal collections, and in 1979 it was transferred to the Zoologische und Anthropologisch-Ethnographische Museum in Dresden, now known as the Museum für Völkerkunde. See Gudrun Meier, "'Zaubertrommeln' und anderes Sámi-Objekte in Sachsen und Thüringen - Zur Geschichte musealen Sammelns," in Abhandlungen und Berichte der Staatlichen Ethnographischen Sammlungen Sachsen, vol. 52 (2005): 189-208.

The extraordinary specificity of this drum suggests that this Meissen figure was specially commissioned. The figure does not appear to be listed in the modellers' surviving work records, which are missing for the period between 1748-1763, and so probably dates to the mid 18th century.

Only one other 18th-century example of this rare model is recorded (fig. 1): a variation probably slightly later in date and holding a conventional cylindrical drum (published in M. Newman, Die deutschen Porzellanmanufakturen, vol.I, 1977, ill. 169; and in Y. Adams, Meissen Portrait Figures, 1987, p. 56). A modern example of the figure is illustrated in K. Berling, Königlich Sächsische Porzellanmanufatur Meissen, 1910, fig. 38, where it is described as an "ägyptische Zauberin" [Egyptian enchantress], presumably the title of the figure in the Meissen manufactory's lists of models. Interestingly, the modern example is holding the Sámi angular-cut drum frame - the same model as the present lot but with the shapes cut out rather than moulded in relief - but one that is lacking the drum-skin and shamanic symbols. This suggests that, by the beginning of the 20th century, the function of the object as a drum was no longer understood, to say nothing of the Sámi drum in the Saxon royal collections that was its model.