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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Sculptures / Mississippian Effigy Pipe - Seated Human Figure at the Bowl
Native American, Mississippian culture. A small human figure straddles the bowl of this horn-shaped clay pipe, head and torso rising from one side of the rim while the legs and feet dangle over the other. The arms fold close to the body, hands laid upon the thighs in an attitude of composed rest. Punctate eyes and mouth read against a single incised vertical line for the ridge of the nose; the ears are omitted entirely, leaving the face pared to essentials. The tapering stem swells slightly before terminating in a rounded, perforated mouthpiece. Hand-built in buff-brown earthenware and burnished before firing, the pipe belongs to the Mississippian effigy tradition, in which tobacco smoke carried petitions upward. The seated posture likely denotes an ancestor, spirit being, or ritual practitioner rather than a portrait of any individual. The Mississippian world, radiating from Cahokia in the American Bottom near present-day St. Louis, was the largest urban and political complex north of Mexico before European contact. Its ritual life turned on maize, ancestors, and the smoking of native tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), a plant potent enough to induce visionary states and reserved for ceremonial rather than casual use. Effigy pipes are among the most articulate survivals of that world. The celebrated examples are carved from Missouri flint clay, but modeled pottery pipes such as this one carried the same iconographic grammar in a more accessible medium. The recurring motif of a seated human, legs pendant or knees drawn up, hands upon the thighs, appears across Mississippian media and is generally read as a figure in ritual attitude: an ancestor at rest, a practitioner awaiting vision, or a personage from the mythic cycles later echoed in the oral traditions of Dhegihan Siouan and Muskogean descendant nations. Item # 202340
Estimate:$300
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorSculptures
Estimate:
$300
ANNA PETRUS. BOKSTÖD, TENN OCH MÄSSING, UTFORMAT SOM LEJON, FÖR FIRMA
09/29/2026
$3,596.65
Est: $3,011.79
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KAI NIELSEN. SKULPTUR, "VENUS KALIPYGOS". TERRAKOTTA. FÖR P. IPSENS ENKE.
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