Woman spinning

Figurine in polychrome baked clay, depicting a woman holding two distaffs or splindles and three chickens. The "Estremoz clay figurines" is a kind of traditional pottery named after the city in the South of Portugal where it developed from the 18th century onwards.

By the 1920s this tradition was on the verge of disappearing and it was recovered by José Sá Lemos, the director of the local Industrial School, with the help of Ana das Peles, the sole remaining practitioner of the art. Althought she was already old at that time, Ana das Peles was responsible for training the new practitioners, namely Mariano da Conceição, one of the co-authors of this item. In this process of recovery, the tradition was also reinvented, and this period marks the design and making of new types of clay figures, such as the Christmas cribs inspired by the "thrones" of St. Anthony and the "cascades" of St. João, used respectively in Lisbon and Porto.

The "Estremoz clay figurines" was one of the types of traditional handicrafts selected by the Bureau for National Propaganda (Secretariado de propaganda Nacional) for display at the international folk-art exhibitions it organized in the 1930s, specifically with objects made by Mariano da Conceição, as it was the case with this "Olive Oil Pedlar", later accessed in the collection of the Popular Art Museum (PAM). His wife, Liberdade da Conceição, also worked in 1940 in the Pavilion of Arts and Crafts of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World and a number of the clay figurines she painted live in that pavilion were later integrated in the Museum collection. The Craftmanship of the Estremoz clay figures is inscribed since 2015 in the Portuguese National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage and, since 2017, in UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO).