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Provenance:

Ritchies Auctioneers, Treasures of a Lifetime - The Collection of William "Billy" Jamieson, Toronto ON, 18 Nov 2012, lot 135
A Prominent Vancouver Collection, British Columbia

Note:

Objects of remarkable technical and aesthetic achievement, bentwood boxes are some of the most iconic objects of art from the Northwest Coast. They also served an important function as storage receptacles for food, clothing, ceremonial regalia, and tools. The sides of boxes were formed through a complex and difficult to achieve technique of heat bending wood that had been carved by hand into a single plank, then fastened together at the base, and one joint on a corner without the aid of nails or glues.


The present box exhibits dramatic and elaborate formline designs on two opposing faces, and compositions on the sides that are said to represent appendages. Interpreting designs on boxes is highly conjectural, however of the present box, it may be said that the designs on the two primary faces of the box are flanked at the bottom by ovoid heads depicting Raven, and that on one face of the box, the design features two hands facing palm outward in a typical Haida motif.


As with many surviving historic Northwest Coast boxes, the present example is missing its original lid, and has been trimmed at its upper edge. Box lids were typically tight fitting, and vermin often burrowed their own entry holes at the upper edge where the body of a box joined to the lid. An additional hole bored at the upper edge of the present box, subsequent to a past trimming hints at the box’s antiquity, and the determination of pests.


Artist and Northwest Coast scholar Bill Holm noted of such unimposing, but quietly exceptional boxes, that it was in just such a box that the old chief Nas shuki yelhel is said to have kept his hoard of daylight at the beginning of the world.[1]


[1] Bill Holm, The box of Daylight: Northwest Coast Indian Art (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1984), 65.


Related Works:
National Museum of the American Indian, Cat. No. NMAI 13/8334. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_148017
National Museum of the American Indian, Cat. No. NMAI 18/8879. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_201960