Lot 92
PUDLO PUDLAT (1916-1992) m., KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET)
Printmaker: EEGYVUDLUK POOTOOGOOK (1931-1999) m., KINNGAIT (CAPE DORSET)
Man Carrying Reluctant Wife, 1961 #16
stencil, 25 x 19 in (63.5 x 48.3 cm)
13/50
Estimate: $6,000— $9,000
Provenance
Private Collection, Australia.
This stunning and perhaps most well known print by Pudlo is a rather atypical narrative work by the artist. Man Carrying Reluctant Wife references the traditional Inuit marriage custom wherein a groom would come to his new wife's camp and 'steal' her away. Pudlo, with great humour and spirit, depicts the dramatic moment when the man hoists his new bride who, with flailing limbs and a deep frown, portrays what Jean Blodgett referred to as "the ideal and modest bride [who] pretended great reluctance to leave her family and her home for her new husband" [1].
Pudlo's fellow artist Pitseolak Ashoona related this personal story to oral historian Dorothy Eber:
When Ashoona [my future husband] came to the camp I didn't know why he came. I didn't know he came for me. I thought he'd just come for a visit - until he started to take me to the sled. I got scared. I was crying and Ashoona was pushing and sometimes picking me up to try to put me on the komatik ['sleigh']. Anyone trying to get married would often have to carry the girl! [2]
1. Jean Blodgett, Eskimo Narrative (WAG, 1979), p. 31.
2. Dorothy Eber, "Eskimo Tales" in Natural History, LXXXVI (October 1985), p. 128.
References: This image is widely illustrated including in: National Museum of Man, The Inuit Print (Ottawa: 1977), cat. 19; Leslie Boyd Ryan, Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007), p. 205; James Houston, Eskimo Prints (Toronto: Longman, 1971) p. 72; Ernst Roch ed., Arts of the Eskimo: Prints (Montreal/Toronto: Signum/Oxford, 1974) p. 57; and Marie Routledge & Marion Jackson, Pudlo: Thirty Years of Drawing (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1990), fig. 5.