A Haida painted basketry hat, possibly the work of Isabella Edenshaw (Kwii.aang) and Charles Edenshaw (Da.axiigang)

Footnotes

Provenance
Adelaide DeMenil and Edmund Carpenter, New York City, 1976
Sold at Sotheby's Important American Indian Art, New York, 2 December 1998, lot 429
The Stanley Miller Collection of Native American Art, acquired at the above

Illustrated
Holm, Bill and Reid, Bill, Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: A Dialogue on Craftsmanship and Aesthetics, 1975, Institute of the Arts, Rice University, Houston, pp. 162-163, fig. 64: "HOLM: Beautifully made spruce-root hat...Nice painting all around in the classic style of an animal spread around the whole hat... REID: Beautiful shape. What really makes Northwest Coast art - from canoes to spoons to hats - is the essential form. Of all the elegant headwear conceived in the world, the spruce-root hat comes close to the best."

Exhibited
Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, "Form and Freedom", October 23, 1975-January 25, 1976; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, March 27-May 30, 1976; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, July 23-August 22, 1976; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, September 14-October 7, 1976; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, January 15-March 13, 1977; Seattle Art Museum, May 11-June 26, 1977; M. H. DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, March 25-May 25, 1978; The St. Louis Art Museum, October 19-December 31, 1978.

The present lot exhibits strong similarities in execution to known examples of Isabella Edenshaw's basketry hats. See Andrea Laforet's essay "Regional and Personal Style in Northwest Coast Basketry", in Porter, Frank W., ed., The Art of Native American Basketry: A Living Legacy, 1990, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, pp.281-297, wherein she discerns the features of Haida weaving that mark an individual weaver's distinctive style. For Isabella Edenshaw's hats, this is characterized by "...the appearance of the 'mamastiki' [concentric diamonds] motif in conjunction with four-ply twining (especially S-twining) at the perimeter of the top, the absence of special demarcation at the lower perimeter of the crown, and the use of four-strand braid... as brim finish when, and this is essential, the construction of the top, crown, and brim of the hat is in accord with the standard Haida formula." Ibid., p.295

Painted frog crest spruce root hats attributed to Isabella Edenshaw and Charles Edenshaw can be found in the collections of the Denver Art Museum (Accession number 1947.338; seen online at https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/1947.338); the Canadian Museum of History (Accession number VII-B-899; seen online at https://www.historymuseum.ca/collections/artifact/59796); the Portland Art Museum (Accession number 48.3.601; seen online at http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=10241;type=101); the Museum of Vancouver (Accession number AA 2404); the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (Accession number Nb1.626); and the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (Accession number 9/8095). These last three examples are illustrated in Charles Edenshaw, 2013, Black Dog Publishing/Vancouver Art Gallery, London, published in conjunction with the 2014 exhibition of the same title, p.94 fig.85, p.96 fig.89 and p.97. fig.90, respectively.

See Holm, Bill, "Will the Real Charles Edensaw Please Stand Up?: The Problem of Attribution in Northwest Coast Indian Art", an essay originally written in 1981 (utilizing an earlier spelling of the artist's last name) and reprinted in Charles Edenshaw, 2013, pp. 81-89. "Interestingly, eighteen painted spruce root hats which I have seen and firmly believe to have been painted by Charles Edensaw share a top painting of a four-pointed star with each point divided alternately red and black (fig.66). Are these top paintings the artist's signature? I'm more and more inclined to believe it. Several other hats, which seem to be Edensaw's work but which differ in composition from those eighteen have an all red four-pointed star design." Ibid. p.86