Tesuque Pueblo Rare Rain God Figurine [SOLD]

This is a most unusual and apparently a fairly rare rain god figurine.  Duane Anderson, formerly of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, identified this hairstyle as the work of Anastasia Romero Vigil.  It is circa 1905.

“Anastasia Romero Vigil and her sister, Francisgita Romero Trujillo, appear to have been key players in the mass production of rain gods as a commodity around 1898.  For many years, however, oral tradition has held that one or both of the sisters invented rain gods.  In a 1995 interview Priscilla Vigil told School of American Research volunteer Gene Miller that her husband’s grandmother, Francisgita Romero, got the idea for making rain gods.

“The first rain god on record (a micaceous clay god holding a pot) is pictured in the Tammen catalog for 1887, when Vigil would have been seventeen years old—arguably too young to have been the inventor (and certainly too young to have been involved in the production of other clay gods dating back to circa 1880).   A more plausible explanation is that she and her sister were involved in some way with the Gunther Candy promotion that Fay-Cooper Cole said was initiated circa 1898.  At that time Anastasia would have been twenty-eight, and formalized rain gods had been in existence for at least fourteen years.”  Anderson 2002

When Duane Anderson conducted a survey of rain gods in museum collections in preparation for publishing the book When Ran Gods Reigned, he found only one of Vigil’s rain gods and it is in the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff.  That is not unusual as museums of that time period did not collect figurines as they felt they were not traditional pueblo pottery.

Vigil was featured on two ca. 1902 postcards making rain gods at Tesuque Pueblo. These were most likely published by the Fred Harvey Company for promotional purposes.

This Tesuque Pueblo rain god figurine is slipped in cream-colored clay with red ink decoration in the form of a necklace, rain streaks on the hair roll, thunder symbols on the cheeks, and decoration on the jar.  Each red decoration is outlined in blue ink.

Condition: Very good condition with only a small rim chip on the jar.

Provenance: from the collection of a gentleman from California who purchased it in the Adobe Gallery 2005 exhibit of 105 rain gods from the collection of Dana Lipsig.

Recommended Reading: When Rain Gods Reigned by Duane Anderson