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Painting of St. George and the Dragon
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 |
| Name of Maker: |
Adamu Tesfaw |
| Ethnic Affiliation: |
Gojjami |
| Date of Production: |
ca. 1993 |
| Locale: |
Addis Ababa |
| Country: |
Ethiopia |
| Dimensions: |
h. 53, w. 68.25 inches |
| Media: |
cotton cloth, oil pigments |
| Collector(s) / Donor(s): |
Raymond Silverman & Neal Sobania |
| MSUM Accession #: |
7557.35 |
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The Collector(s) / Donor(s)
Raymond Silverman, curator of "African Connections," is an associate professor of art history at Michigan State University. He also serves as adjunct curator for the African collections housed in the University's two museums. From 1979 to 1989 his research was focused in the West African countries of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, and from 1990 to the present, in Ethiopia. This object is one of several hundred artifacts that Silverman and Sobania commissioned and collected in the course of conducting research for the 1994 Michigan State University Museum exhibition, Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity.
Collector(s) / Donor(s) Statement: Silverman
Neal Sobania is Professor of History and Director of International Education at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. After spending three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia, he returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. at the University of London dealing with the history of the Dassanetch peoples of northern Kenya. Since his Peace Corps experience in Ethiopia in the late 1960s, he has been a avid collector of African material culture and possesses a significant collection of Ethiopian and Kenyan artifacts. For the last eight years, he and Silverman have been collaborating on a number of projects dealing with the visual cultures of Ethiopia.
Collector(s) / Donor(s) Statement: Sobania
The Object(s)
Painting associated with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a tradition stretching back to the fifth or sixth century. Christianity was introduced in Ethiopia at the beginning of the fourth century. The general approach to representing religious themes is grounded in Late Antique and Byzantine practices. In many respects, Ethiopian paintings conform to an idiom generally associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church--one can observe affinities with the Christian paintings of Coptic Egypt, Greece, Armenia, and Russia. Even so, Ethiopian painting is easily distinguished from these other traditions. In addition to references to local (Ethiopian) saints and historical figures, common subjects like the Madonna and Child or the Flight into Egypt are given an Ethiopian character by depicting the figures in the composition in traditional Ethiopian garb. Saint George is one of the most popular saints in Ethiopia, and the subject of the saint slaying the dragon is a favorite theme in Church painting. Adamu Tesfaw, a ordained priest who learned to paint as part of his religious education, painted this example on cloth in 1993 for Michigan State University Museum. Paintings like this one traditionally have been destined for the walls of Ethiopian churches, but roughly one hundred years ago, European visitors to Ethiopia developed an interest in these paintings and began acquiring them. Today artists like Adamu produce paintings for the Church as well as for visitors to Ethiopia.
Further Information
Books and Articles
Stanislaw Chojnacki. "Short Introduction to Ethiopian Painting." Journal of Ethiopian Studies 2 (2) 1964: 1-11.
Stanislaw Chojnacki. Major Themes in Ethiopian Painting: Indigenous Developments, the Influence of Foreign Models and their Adaptation from the 13th to the 19th Century. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983.
Marilyn Heldman with Stuart C. Munro-Hay. African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Jules Leroy. Ethiopian Painting in the Late Middle Ages and During the Gondar Dynasty. New York: Praeger, 1967.
Religious Art of Ethiopia. Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 1973.
Raymond Silverman. "Qes Adamu Tesfaw--A Priest Who Paints." Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity, edited by R. Silverman, pp. 132-55, 261-66. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
Internet Resources
Artist Profile for Adamu Tesfaw from Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity
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