Nayarit Chinesco Type E Kneeling Female Figure with Red Painted Hand

Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Nayarit, Chinesco. A hollow pottery figure of a kneeling woman, both arms held at her sides and bent at the elbows so that her hands rest together on her stomach. The large ovoid head sits on a slender neck and swells backward from a steeply sloping forehead, a profile that likely reflects the cranial shaping practiced in ancient West Mexico. Her features are small and low on the face: slit coffee-bean eyes, a pointed nose with pierced nostrils, a narrow painted mouth, and a pierced ear lobe perhaps meant to hold an ornament. A cream slip covers the body. Red-orange and black details mark a collar, a line down the chest, armbands, and a sash at the hips. A red-orange hand print on her right cheek probably records face paint, so a living woman's adornment is preserved in the clay. "Chinesco" is a collectors' term from the mid-20th century. Early dealers thought the serene, almond-eyed faces of these figures looked Asian, and the name stuck even though it says nothing about their origin. The style belongs to the shaft tomb tradition of Nayarit, where hollow ceramic figures were placed in deep chambers cut into bedrock, probably as companions for the dead or stand-ins for them. Hasso von Winning later sorted Chinesco figures into lettered types by their facial and bodily conventions. Collectors and dealers still use his system to tell the substyles apart. Item # 205659

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