Untitled (Inuit Bible Class)

Ennutsiak

1963

Gift of the Museum of Inuit Art, Toronto, inv. 2018.88

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

A dark stone sculpture depicts seven figures seated together, each holding a small, light-colored rectangular object, possibly a book or sheet of music. Like many Inuit artists born in the late nineteenth century, Ennutsiak rendered a number of traditional Inuit lifestyle subjects in his depictions of small groups of people engaged in everyday activities. Ennutsiak’s small-scale stone carvings are almost all little “tableaux” works, comprising seated or crouching figures arranged on a base, engaged in a communal activity. By the early twentieth century Inuit activities on southern Baffin Island, as well as in several other areas of the Canadian Arctic, would have included attending religious services in small Christian churches, where available, or simply in a tent or igloo, thus fo