- Museum number
- Am.1678
- Description
-
Mask or more properly frontlet on a frame for a headdress. The frontlet is perhaps carved of alder, with two three dimensional heads, the lower one in the form of a bear's head, the ears combining with the hands of the upper one, which may represent a woman, suggested by the projecting lower lip - implying the presence of a labret. The sides of the frontlet are carved with a vertical series of parallel gouge marks, which frame the heads. The lower bear mask has an open broad band Tlingit-style mouth, filled with Tlingit-style opercula teeth [one or two of which may also be of other shell-material]. The mouth is painted red, with a sharp outline depression carved round the mouth and flowing into the red painted nostrils. The shallow carved eyes are carved on slightly bulging orbs, in a near vertical plane, with inlaid roundels of California haliotis shell, that on the left pierced with a hole for suspension, as though it came off a California necklace. The broad eyebrows are painted black. The carved vertically projecting ears are inlaid with pale local abalone, and painted red. The upper mask is similar in style and details, except that the human ears are carved to the side, and painted red, and the eyebrows are raised bands painted black. The faces and sides are painted in an early copper green. The lower mask is excavated on the inside, and the upper inside edge seems to be painted with spruce gum. // The most unusual feature of the headdress is the framework of baleen. This consists five vertical pieces, a roundel at the bottom, and two further horizontal struts on each side. A single horizontal strut runs at the top behind the frontlet. It is held together with a mixture of material, principally including Polynesian [?] bark cloth, but maybe also including sinnet, and commercial twine. This suggests that this, like the "Truro" mask (1986 Am19 collection), may have been collected in Polynesia, or possibly decorated with Pacific materials on the Northwest Coast. The roundel at the bottom seems also to include under the bark cloth a wrapped padding of red [?] wool cloth.
- Production date
- 1780-1865
- Dimensions
-
Height: 17 centimetres
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Width: 17 centimetres
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Depth: 27 centimetres
- Curator's comments
-
This has a cloth label contemporary with accession 'USM Nootka Sound? No 8.' The most important collection from the United Service[s] Museum is the one, of which this is a part, acquired at some unspecified time during the 1860s. The RUSI, the successor organisation to the USM, has few 19th century records, though their 19th century journal sometimes includes list of accessions to the Museum. There was material collected by Vancouver and Beechey in the USM; one of the other important North American pieces is an Aleut helmet Christy 2240, of the closed type sometimes said to have been only in the 19th century. So one guess would be that this was collected by Beechey on HMS Blossom during the 1820s. 'Nootka Sound' was in the early 19th century a generic term for the Northwest Coast and should not be taken literally, as happened with R T Coe's 'Sacred Circles', London: Arts Council, 1976, no.288, p.140, where the wrong attribution of 'Nootka' is given. Coe also suggested that this was 18th century, but the use of California abalone and association with the nineteenth century USM [founded in 1830] suggests that it is later. A post-accession hand suggests on the label that this is Haida, which it could be, but more likely is a Coast Tsimshian or even Tlingit attribution. (JCK,11 & 13/6/1996, plus new description etc.)
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Related image: This frontlet with headdress frame can be seen in the BM AOA Pictorial collection Am-B44-37.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
1976-1977 7 Oct-16 Jan, London, The Hayward Gallery
1977 16 Apr-19 Jun, Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art
2003 15 Dec-2009 Jun, BM Room 24: Wellcome Trust Gallery, dc4, Living and Dying
- Condition
- Good.
- Acquisition date
- 1860-1869
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- Am.1678
- Additional IDs
-
CDMS number: Am186?C1.1678 (old CDMS no.)
