Earl Collection
About the collection
The Earl Collection, one of the Basque Library’s newest collections, showcases arborglyphs that were etched into aspen trees by generations of Basque sheepherders throughout the mountains of the American West. These distinctive figures - along with names, dates, and sayings - were carved by Basque sheepherders in the early to mid-20th century. Unique to the area, the Basque tree carvings are beautiful examples of human artistic creativity, even in the most humble of material circumstances, and serve as a historical and cultural record of the Basque sheepherder experience.
Collection strengths
For more than half a century, Jean and Phillip Earl of Reno used clues from old maps, letters, and books to hunt for and document these arborglyphs carved into aspen trees found in the high-country meadows of the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevada. Jean Earl evolved a unique method of preserving the carvings using muslin and black wax to create rubbings, two-dimensional representations of the carvings that are works of art themselves, eventually assembling over 130 wax-on-muslin rubbings made directly from the carvings.
The Basque Library is part of the Arborglyph Collaborative, a tri-state academic partnership geared towards documenting and sharing Basque arborglyphs.