UNIDENTIFIED TLINGIT ARTIST
Feast Tray, c. 1850
wood, 34.5 x 9 x 4.5 in (87.6 x 22.9 x 11.4 cm)
unsigned;
inscribed indistinctly in graphite in an unknown hand, "WSS[?] ?"

Provenance
Private Collection, Vancouver;
A New York Collection.

The long narrow feast tray has an extensive history on the northern Northwest Coast, only undergoing relatively minor changes and developments over time. Succeeding generations of artists worked to add new ideas to the tradition without altering the essence of the subject, in this case the feast tray. Older examples lack the angled peak at each end, on both the outside and inside edges. The ends of the oldest examples are generally made with shallow curves from corner to corner, and only a narrow flat area at each end, often without a formline pattern engraved in it, embellished instead with parallel grooves or opercula inlays. The wide, undercut rim seen here on the sides is narrower and less undercut in older trays. The features contained in this example came into being over time, incrementally, a little more here, a little more there, until examples like this with their striking geometry came into existence.

The subtle flare of the ends, the delicate curvature and sweep of the sides, and the raising of the ends in profile are characteristics that have come down in the tray tradition, consistent in varying degrees from one artist to another. This example has achieved a great deal of development, absorbed from all the related works that came before it.

The shallowly relief-carved formline patterns on the ends of this tray are simplified primary formline structures, without elaborate secondary design detail. Representation is therefore impossible to identify with accuracy and would only be known to the carver and the owner who commissioned the work.

Steven C. Brown

References: For a fine similar work (with opercula) see First Arts Auction, Nov. 2021, Lot 49. For a fine comparable and contemporaneous Haida or Tsimshian example see Gilbert T. Vincent et al, Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection, (Cooperstown: Fenimore Art Museum, 2000), pp. 336-337. For another Haida example see Steven Brown, ed., The Spirit Within: Northwest Coast Native Art from the John H. Hauberg Collection, (New York: Rizzoli / Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1995), cat. 43; the aforementioned example is also illustrated and discussed in Bill Holm, The Box of Daylight: Northwest Coast Indian Art, (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum and Univ. of Washington Press, 1983), cat. 120. See also Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Boxes and Bowls; Decorated Containers by Nineteenth-Century Haida, Tlingit, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian Indian Artists, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974), cats. 29-32. See also Henry B. Collins et. al., The Far North: 2000 Years of American Eskimo and Indian Art, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), cat. 223. See also Donald Ellis Gallery 2001 (Toronto: Donald Ellis Gallery, 2001), p. 29.