Seated Male Storyteller Figurine with One Child [SOLD]

When Helen Cordero created what today is known as the Storyteller figurine, she reinvented a longstanding but inactive Cochiti Pueblo tradition of figurative pottery, a tradition dating back to the 1880s.  She ignited a revolution in pueblo ceramic figurative pottery comparable to the revivals by Nampeyo of the Tewa village at Hopi and by Maria Martinez of the Tewa village of San Ildefonso.

Helen Cordero started making pottery figurines in the late 1950s, mostly small frogs, birds, animals and small people.  When she exhibited her pottery at a Santo Domingo feast day, folk art collector Alexander Girard bought all of the little people figures.  He asked her to make more people figurines and bring them to him.  He then asked her to make a larger seated figure with children.  It was then that Helen began visioning her grandfather, Santiago Quintana, who was a good storyteller and grandchildren were always around him.

In 1960-1961, Helen had made a seated female holding one child (a Singing Mother figure).  It was minimally sanded and slipped with a somewhat rough surface.  These early figures of hers featured large areas of cream slip and little painted decoration.  The eyes were open and there were painted eyebrows.  On her first “storyteller” figurine, Helen placed open eyes and eyebrows as well, something she changed in later figurines. 

This male storyteller figurine has features of Helen’s earliest figurines.  The surface of the figurine is largely cream slip with minimal painted decoration, there is only one child, and the slip is rougher to the touch that the more refined sanded ones later.  The eyes are open and there are eyebrows, similar to the female figurine in Plate 2, page 94 of the Babcock book on the history of storytellers (see reference below), which is estimated to have been made around 1960.  It is for these reasons that this figurine is estimated to be one of the very early storytellers by Helen Cordero, probably shortly after the first one was made in 1964.  It is easy to justify a date of circa 1965 on this male storyteller wearing a hat.

Condition: excellent condition with no evidence of repairs or restoration

Reference and Recommended Reading: The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition by Barbara A. Babcock

Provenance: from a private collection