Three Jalisco Pottery Figures - Mother, Standing Woman & Drummer

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Jalisco. A trio of hand-modeled earthenware figures from the shaft-tomb cultures of western Mexico, each burnished in warm slips of red and buff. Two are standing females with columnar legs, broad shoulders, and elaborate coiffures bound in fillets; one cradles an infant against her breast, a tender emblem of fertility and lineage. Painted linework fans across the third woman's torso and skirt, imitating woven textile and body ornament. The third figure is a seated drummer, hunched over a cylindrical instrument gripped between his hands, his headdress rising in peaks. Modeled with the exaggerated slit-and-punch features typical of Jalisco workshops, these figures were interred as grave companions, meant to populate the afterlife with the rhythms and kinships of daily existence. Jalisco figures belong to the shaft-tomb tradition of western Mexico (roughly Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit), a mortuary culture that buried its dead in deep vertical shafts opening into lateral chambers. Unlike the state-level iconography of central Mexico, these works celebrate the domestic and communal: mothers with children, warriors, ballplayers, and musicians. The drummer belongs to a recurring class of performer figures that suggest funerary rites accompanied by music and dance, while the maternal figure speaks to the lineage and continuity the tomb was meant to preserve. The "coffee bean" eye, a raised oval slit with a central punch, is a diagnostic hallmark of the tradition. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204125

Estimate:£261.63

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