This is a re-donatinon of a print won in a previous auction. The donor has simply run out of wall space and wants to share the print with the community that will most appreciate it. It is now framed and remains in excellent condition.

KWAKIUTL CANOES

Giclée  print, in archival inks on acid- and lignin-fee paper

Original painting in oil on canvas board, 30” X 24”, 1959

Collection of Donn Charnley

The Beaver: Magazine of the North, Summer 1961 cover

The Canoe  1983, full page color

Alaskafest, May 1984 Alaska Airlines Magazine  cover

The painting depicts a Kwakwaka’wakw  canoe traveling down Kingcome Inlet near the mouth of Wakeman Sound, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century.  Another canoe is seen some distance away.  The Sisiutl, a legendary serpent-like creature, is painted on the near canoe.  The bowman wears a white Hudson’s Bay Company blanket around his waist, but some of the crewmen are wearing cedar bark robes, suggesting that it is early in the trade period.

The picture was made to accompany an article on my making a 24-foot canoe in 1958, following a detailed account of canoe-making recorded fifty years earlier by George Hunt and published by Franz Boas.  The article, with the accompanying photographs, was published in The Beaver, the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine, and the painting was used as the cover.