Makah Cradle Figure

George Terasaki, New York

Herbert G. Wellington, Jr., Locust Valley, New York, acquired from the above by 1982

Sotheby's, New York, May 20, 2009, lot 203, consigned by the estate of his wife, Patricia B. Wellington

Private Collection, Oregon, acquired at the above auction

Douglas C. Ewing, Pleasing the Spirits: A Catalogue of a Collection of American Indian Art, New York, 1982, p. 76, pl. 26, and p. 84, cat. no. 5

Zena Pearlstone Mathews, Color and Shape in American Indian Art, New York, 1983, p. 23, cat. no. 48 (listed)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Color and Shape in American Indian Art, March 25 - July 3, 1983

The tradition of carved wooden figures on the Northwest Coast appears to date back to at least the mid to late 18th century, with the earliest recorded example being a Nuu-chah-nulth figure of a mother holding a child in a cradle, which is now in the British Museum, London (inv. no. Am,NWC.63; illustrated in J. C. H. King, Artificial Curiosities from the Northwest Coast of America […], London, 1981, n.p., col. pl. 13, and n.p., pl. 59, cat. no. 84). That sculpture is one of several Nuu-chah-nulth sculptures depicting mothers and their infants that were collected during Captain Cook’s Third Voyage, which left Nootka Sound in April 1778, in search of the Northwest Passage.

Cradle figures were made by many different peoples across the Northwest Coast, from the Lower Columbia River to the north of Vancouver Island. Like the present example, most cradle figures are carved from a single piece of wood, although there are at least two examples that are made with cradle and child carved separately (including the Salish or Nuu-chah-nulth example from the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, inv. no. T514 A, B; illustrated in Gilbert T. Vincent, Sherry Brydon, and Ralph T. Coe, eds., Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection, Cooperstown, New York, 2000, p. 304).

Most cradle figures show the child in a reclining position, often with their feet or knees elevated, and carved to portray the figure covered or wrapped in a cedar bark, skin, or cloth blanket or robe. Some figures, including the example illustrated by the missionary, scholar, and collector Myron Eells (1843-1907), include straps or cords that show how a child would have been secured in their cradle (see George Pierre Castile, ed., The Indians of Puget Sound: The Notebooks of Myron Eells, Seattle, 1985, p. 298). A small number of examples include a separate woven cedar bark cover that was secured with string or cordage over the figure, apparently as a representation of the actual woven mats that were used on infants in their cradles (see the example in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, inv. no. 18-12-10/87342).

An indication of texture is created on the cradle and blanket of the present example by short, diagonally incised marks: a highly distinctive feature which can also be seen on a Makah dish – squarer but otherwise not dissimilar in form to this cradle – in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (inv. no. 1/9414).