Bowl with legs

This delightful bowl is a good example of the imaginative use of form and proportion which distinguishes many of the best Northwest Coast sculptures. It is as if what interested the artist were the formal properties of a sculpture, and proportion and anatomical arrangement were modified to suit the general form of the object, whether it was a mask, mortuary post or bowl. The legs on this bowl are clearly human, but the arms and face have frog characteristics. Frogs, or, more properly, toads, appear frequently on carvings and in myths (see Jonaitis, 1986: 76).

Comparable material is scarce. The Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands were expert horn carvers and the famous Haida anthropomorphic wood bowl in the British Museum, collected by Dixon (King, 1981: no. 49), has some features in common, but a precise attribution is not possible. The material is dark and has the general appearance of wood, but exposure to bright light shows it to be translucent and therefore made of horn. It may have served as a cup or dipper; there are deposits of oil. Two holes in the rim were for suspension cords and the eyes were probably once inlaid with abalone shell.

Steven Hooper, 1997

Entry taken from Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Vol. 2: Pacific, African and Native North American Art, edited by Steven Hooper (Yale University Press, 1997) p. 284.