Footnotes

• Provenance:
  Purchased from Donald Ellis Gallery, Dundas, Ontario, May 1996; Sotheby's, New York, 30 November 1995, lot 185, from a private collection, New England; formerly on loan to the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester MA; appeared in the exhibit Northwest Coast Indian Art Tradition: Collected Heritage, Grace Hudson Museum, Ukiah, CA, 6 September – 23 November 2003
  
  This is a very fine soapberry spoon. There are massive early style formlines on the blade, representing some creature I can't identify. Great old formline creature(s?) on the handle. It would take some guesswork and more detailed pictures to identify the figure on the blade, but I believe the figure on the handle is a sealion, with large clawed flippers and ears. It is probably Tlingit.
  - from a personal communication with Bill Holm
  
  In a letter of 31 March 1998, Steve Brown identifies this spoon as having been carved by the artist who carved two of the ones exhibited in the Native Visions exhibition, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, 19 February - 10 May 1998; (see Fig. 3.6 on p. 29 of Brown, Steven C., Native Visions: Evolution in Northwest Coast Art from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Century). Very similar to two spoons that appeared in The Box of Daylight exhibition, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, 15 September 1983 - 8 January 1984; see Holm, Bill, The Box of Daylight, 1983, the catalog of that exhibition.
  - collectors' notes

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Category: Ethnographic Art / Native American

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