Additional Images

Provenance:

Estate of Harold Pfeiffer, Ottawa, ON;
Waddington's Auctioneers, Toronto, ON, 16 Nov 1998, lot 304;
Private Collection, Ontario

Literature:

Waddington’s Auctioneers, Important Sale by Auction, (Toronto: Island Communications, 1998), 43, pl. 304 P

Note:

Over his lifetime, sculptor Harold Pfeiffer created many portraits of Inuit sitters with whom he was well acquainted. Some of Pfeiffer’s most exceptional portraits were of fellow artists.

During the early 1950s, Pfeiffer’s friends Jim and Alma Houston suggested that he join the federal department of Northern Affairs to work with tuberculosis patients in hospitals and rehabilitation centres in the Arctic. There Pfeiffer would work with many of the important artists who were treated at the hospital, most notably Kenojuak Ashevak.

Ninety-one portraits by Pfeiffer of Inuit and First Nations subjects are held in two major collections: one in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the other in the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. His work is also held in a number of other public collections, including the Itsanitaq Museum in Churchill, Manitoba, La Musée d’art in Joliette, Quebec, the R.C.M.P. Museum in Regina, Saskatchewan and the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec.

The present sculpture is of artist Patrick Koagatark (Kagoatark) of Arviliqjuaq (Pelly Bay). Born in 1915, little is known about the artist, although his work has been included in exhibitions at the Alaskan Methodist University Galleries in Anchorage, Alaska, and the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau.

References:
Waddington’s Auctioneers, Important Sale by Auction, (Toronto: Island Communications, 1998), 3