Tlingit Wood Effigy Bowl

with flat base and bulging sides, a beaver on the front end, with protruding snout inset with blue glass beads, wide-set pointed oval eye rims beneath arched brows and conventionalized ears, a stick held in its front paws, surmounting a compact human figure, the sides with form line elements carved in relief, probably representations of the back legs and feet, the opposite end decorated with a bird, probably a raven, with straight beak, and a sculpted human or spirit face emerging from between its ears.

Collected in Sitka, Alaska

Heye Foundation, 9/8419

Deaccessioned via exchange, 1957

In a written assessment that accompanies the bowl, Steve Brown writes: "This extremely curvaceous and highly embellished container has been carved to appear as much like a bent-corner bowl as it was practical for a sculptural vessel to be. Several traditional features often found on bent-corner bowls are present here...The technical difficulty of hollowing out such deeply bulging sides (and especially the ends) of such a container would seem to counter-balance with the technical effort required to form and bend the sides of a bent-corner vessel....Perhaps the choice...was due to the knowledge and experience of the carver...The artists or his patron may have admired the bent-corner vessels enough to nonetheless imitate their appearance so specifically."

For a discussion of bowls from the Northwest Coast see William C. Sturtevant, Boxes and Bowls: Decorated Containers by Nineteenth-Century Haida, Tlingit, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian Indian Artists, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1974, pp: 16 – 19: "The boxes and bowls of the Northwest Coast Indians, although used primarily for holding food and valuables, also served as symbols of wealth and prestige. Such containers became showpieces on two specific occasions-the regular feast meal and the potlatch. While a feast was simply a large communal meal, the potlatch was not only an elaborate communal meal with many courses and rare foods served in decorated containers, but also an occasion for the exchange of gifts. Potlatch feasting, display, and gift-giving were the means by which prestige and hereditary rank among the Indians were established and validated. On such occasions, boxes and bowls reached their highest significance.

During a potlatch great attention was paid to the dishes used. Because they were covered with family crests handed down from the past, such containers were signs of high hereditary position. Moreover, the size and lavishness of each container corresponded to the rank of the guest who used it and to the ability of the host to impress his guests. As each guest was given a dish in order of his rank, the speaker called out the names of the dishes and the corresponding ancestral history. All were urged to eat well and to eat as much as possible. Whatever food remained was taken home by the guests as a gift from the hosts, often in finely wrought little wooden dishes.

Serving and eating meals were the most elaborate parts of the entire food process, and at such times containers were used to the greatest extent. During the summer months of food gathering, however, family meals were often haphazard and irregular. Frequently families did gather in the afternoon or early evening for a meal, but most formal meals were great social events involving much preparation and many people....As can be seen in the close relationship between hierarchy and ornamentation and the use to which each box or bowl was put, artistic appreciation was less of an issue to the Indians of the nineteenth century than were symbolic ties to wealth and ancestry-although the Indians by no means lacked an aesthetic sensitivity to these containers. The importance of boxes and bowls to Indian culture lay, then, both in their value as strictly functional objects and in their value as symbols of rank and wealth. Boxes and bowls played a key role of mediation between the natural, biological act of eating and the human, cultural act of feasting. These objects also related the ceremonies of rank in the present-the potlatch-to the ancestors, whose presences were manifested in the crests carved or painted on the containers. To their original makers and owners, these objects were truly what Claude Levi-Strauss called "living boxes," endowed with a powerful life and vitality that survive even now and enable us to appreciate them in a vastly different context."

For related examples please see Sotheby's New York, May 2006, lot 24; and Sotheby's New York, October 2006, lots 1 and 2.