Model canoes have been created on the Northwest Coast since before Euro-American arrival in the late eighteenth century. Created to teach prospective canoe makers, or to represent full-size canoes as gifts in potlatching, many are accurate in proportion and form and decorated with painted designs. Early explorers and their crews of sailors were naturally interested in and admired the sophisticated Native watercraft, and the making of models for sale and trade expanded rapidly going into the nineteenth century. Models were made of nearly every traditional canoe type, though the majority of surviving models from the northern coast were of the Northern canoe, as seen in this example.

The designs on the exterior of this model are of a late nineteenth-century style, and unusual for being relief-carved, which of course would never be the case on a full-sized canoe as it would greatly increase drag.

Steven C. Brown

The noted collector Ralph T. Coe acquired a Tlingit model canoe and wrote in the 2003 Metropolitan Museum catalogue, The Responsive Eye, that he had never seen an example that was both relief carved and painted; he suggested that his example was possibly unique. This confirms the rarity of our example, as well as its origin in the northern Northwest Coast.

References: For a similar example by a Tlingit artist see Ralph T. Coe et al, The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), cat. 94.