UNIDENTIFIED ARTIST, TLINGIT, SITKA, ALASKA

Bear Form Feast Bowl,c. 1890

wood and abalone, 3.5 x 10.75 x 4.5 in (8.9 x 27.3 x 11.4 cm)

unsigned.

Provenance

Private Collection, Seattle;

A Vancouver Collection.

Animal-form bowls from the Northwest Coast take on a broad range of sizes and types, from feast size to personal vessels, carved to bent-corner manufacture. Visitors to the Northwest Coast have marvelled at them since the earliest days of nineteenth-century tourism, patronizing curio shops that became destinations for steamship passengers in ports like Juneau and Sitka. Sitka was home to two Tlingit artists who made dozens of highly decorated bowls that have since been scattered to museums around the world. Rudolph Walton and Augustus Bean had related late-period styles of carving, flat design and inlay that they employed to make the untold number of vessels they produced between about 1890 and 1910. They also appeared to have followers and possibly apprentices, such as the individual who created this small bowl with some characteristics of their style. The small bowl cavity and oval mother-of-pearl inlaid pieces have much in common with the Walton-Bean workshop productions, though their work was always more inventive and detailed than this example. The incised face at the rear is a simplified version of the deeply relieved formline faces often seen on bowls as a foundation for the hind legs of represented creatures.

Steven C. Brown

Literature: The face on the back rim of the bowl is reminiscent of the designs seen on some late period argillite bowls - see Carol Sheehan, Pipes that won’t Smoke: Coal that won’t Burn: Haida Sculpture in Argillite (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, 1981), p. 172.