Bowl

Museum number:

2-13166

Permalink:

ark:/21549/hm21020013166

Accession number:

Acc.100IY

Description:

Seal shaped. Black-stained wood, (yew? or Honduran mahogany); carved bone teeth and ovals around bowl rim; warm water abalone in nostrils, eyes and tail (inlay in one nostril and one side of tail missing); small white "seed" bead inlay elsewhere; stylized head and octopus tentacles on both sides in relief.

Donor:

Warwick Miller Tompkins

Collection place:

Sitka, Baranof Island, Sitka Borough

Verbatim coll. place:

Alaska; Alexander Archipelago; Sitka

Culture or time period:

Tlingit

Maker or artist:

Augustus Bean [Tlingit] and Rudolf Walton

Collector:

Warwick Miller Tompkins

Collection date:

1875-1925

Object type:

ethnography

Object class:

Bowls (vessels) and Carvings (visual works)

Function:

5.7 Objects made for sale, souvenirs, models, and reproductions

Production date:

1875-1925

Accession date:

July 1928

Context of use:

Probably a food bowl but made for sale. (cont'd from Comments) .. the school's shop to create a new style of food dishes based on traditional models but with important innovations in the use of materials, of which a greater range was now available than had

Department:

Native US and Canada (except California)

Dimensions:

length 38 centimeters

Comment:

Photo: yes. Published: "Art of Northwest Coast Indians", fig. 199, R.B. Inverarity, U.C. Press, 1950. References: see above and "A Catalogue of the Ethnological Collections in the Sheldon Jackson Museum", Sitka, 1976, pp. 38-41. This piece formerly thought to be a Japanese fake but Bill Holm (1977) visited the Lowie Museum and suggested the above identification. Library exhibit, 1977: "NEW INFORMATION ON 'JAPANESE' NORTHWEST COAST CARVINGS" For many years ethnologists and others interested in the artifacts of Native American cultures have accepted as conventional wisdom that a certain class of wood objects carved in the Northwest Coast Indian style were actually Japanese commercial copies of traditional Northwest Coast carvings. To support this surmise experts pointed to differences between traditional and 'Japanese' carvings. According to these authorities the foreign copies differed from native work primarily in their use of materials: the wood was stained a dark color, bone was substituted for shell in much of the inlaid decoration, and a warm water variety of abalone shell was used for eyes and other body details. There was also a feeling that these foreign copies had a 'stiff' quality altogether lacking in real Northwest Coast carvings. The precise sources of the theory of Japanese origins are now unknown, but for many years the information was passed from one scholar to another until it became a 'truth'. Objects in the presumed foreign style, including a food dish shown here, have been exhibited and published as Japanese copies. A 1976 publication of the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka, Alaska, has finally proved that the objects in question, mostly food bowls, are indeed true Northwest Coast carvings. In the late nineteenth century the missionary Sheldon Jackson maintained a school for Tlingit Indians at Sitka. It was here that two Tlingits, Augustus Bean and Rudolph Walton, learned to use the sophisticated carving tools of the school's shop to create a new style of food dishes based on traditional models but with important innovations in the use of materials, of which a greater range was now available than had been available for traditional carvers. Bean and Walton continued to work in this new style after they left the school and they marketed their work through their own shop in Sitka. For some reason it has taken three quarters of a century for them to get the credit for their fine work.

Loans:

S1945-1946 #4: Winfield Scott Wellington (March 11, 1946–October 28, 1955), S1951-1952 #1: University of California, Los Angeles (March 15, 1952–returned by 1957), S1962-1963 #62: Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology/Alex Nicoloff (June 27, 1963–June 29, 1963), and S1990-1991 #23: Blackhawk Museums (March 20, 1991–August 16, 1994)

Images:

Legacy documentation: