Kahnawake Furniture

One challenge I ran into between finalizing the sketches and setting up the models has had to do with proportions. When I make sketches I can pose the human body in whatever way I want, but real human beings don't work that way. Comfort and usage result in narrower ranges of motion. When it came time to pose my models I realized that if I wanted St. Kateri and the girl in the planned arrangement, then St. Kateri's legs would need to bend in some miraculous ways, or the girl would need to be much younger. The solution I settled on was to have St. Kateri sitting on something.

This, of course, resulted in another problem: upon what does she sit? Or, more to the point, upon what would a woman living in a late 17th century Canadian mission village sit? That called for more research. I initially thought I'd find something with three legs: it seemed simpler and much easier for the carpenter to level. So I was very surprised that the vast majority I looked at were four legged. I don't think I found a single three legged stool from earlier than the 18th century. That's not to say they weren't made. It could be the case that they just haven't survived to make it into museum collections. Maybe they were so common that no one preserved them, or so poorly made that they well apart. But rather than take a risk by trying to paint something I haven't seen, I kept looking for something from the right location and dated to the right time period.

I found something plausible to paint in the collection of the Musee de la Civilization in Quebec City. The stool in question came from a farm in the Quebec Province, and has been dated to early 1700's . It's simplicity and functional appearance make it an excellent fit. It is plausible that the residents of Kahnawake could have made this stool, or traded for it. The image above comes from the museum's online archive.