Ivory figurine of Eve

This slender ivory figure of a standing young woman, carved from a single tapering section of tusk and left in its own warm honey-cream tone, turns her head gently to one side as she draws a small bird to her breast with her raised right hand; her lowered left hand gathers a fold of drapery or scarf at her hip, the cloth falling in a heavy cascade down her left side almost to the integrally carved, stepped circular socle. Beside her right leg, a carved stump or branch, its bark rendered in flattened, overlapping ridges, rises to steady her at roughly waist height — a solution as structural as it is decorative, since a slim figure carved from a single small tusk needs, at this height, a broader footing than the tusk's own girth can supply.

The figure's proportions and slight torsion follow the natural curve of the tusk from which it was cut: the carver has let the ivory's own taper set the gentle contrapposto, thickening the drapery and stump toward the base to compensate for the material narrowing toward the top. Such compromises are typical of small figural ivories, sculptors habitually building out weak points — a scarf, a stump, a plinth — to disguise the material's limits. The tusk itself, weighing only 175 grams and some 4.5 centimetres across at the base, was a modest one, and the statuette is correspondingly intimate in scale. As a worked object of elephant ivory carved before 1947, it is accompanied by an EU certificate for commercial use issued by the Belgian CITES authority.