Hermon Atkins MacNeil: Hopi — Prayer for Rain, 1931 – Porcelain Art Mug

250th Anniversary · Jubilee Edition

Thirty-Six Years Later

In the summer of 1895 a young American sculptor climbed the mesa in northern Arizona and watched the Hopi snake dance. Within two years Hermon Atkins MacNeil had made a bronze of it — a runner carrying serpents down from the mesa, cast at Fonderia Nelli in Rome. Then he let the subject rest.

Thirty-six years later the Society of Medalists asked him for their third issue. He went back to the same moment and cut it into a medal seventy-two millimetres across. The runners again, and this time more of them: four figures strung out along the trail, lightning breaking overhead, the mesa low on the horizon, and the words PRAYER FOR RAIN set into the foot of the disc.

MacNeil explained the choice himself: All these Southwest Indians, living as they do in an arid region, have developed their religion along the lines of their greatest need — water.

The medal was issued in 1931: one thousand seven hundred and thirteen pieces in bronze, twenty-five in silver. MacNeil chose four patinas for it — tan, sea green, hematite red — and the piece is very slightly oval, not round, because he drew it that way.

A relief is a different thing from a statue. It has no silhouette; everything in it is made of light. Held in the hand at breakfast, it does what a coin does — it asks to be turned towards the window.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Hermon Atkins MacNeil (1866–1947), Hopi — Prayer for Rain, medal, 1931, reverse. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1972.167.10, gift of the heirs of Albert Laessle. Free to use. The medal is in the public domain in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom, and in the United States: it was published in 1931 with a copyright notice, but no renewal was registered in 1958 or 1959.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.