The top half of this rare work by Niviaqsi is an image that was chosen for the 1959 print Snow House Builders, one of only about fifteen prints created by the artist before his mysterious death in 1959. Niviaqsi and Pootoogook were the two most important contributors to the inaugural Cape Dorset print collection of 1959. Niviaqsi was an outstanding sculptor (see Lot 26) but he is best remembered for his iconic prints, several of which celebrated traditional hunting and fishing. In this work there is an atmosphere of calm, with tired sled dogs resting while the two hunters prepare a snow house and organize their belongings. It is an interesting contrast to the scene on the lower half of the sheet, where an Inuk carefully approaches a still living trapped fox. What unifies the two scenes is Niviaqsi’s silhouette-style rendering of his subjects with a confident and authoritative hand. The distinctive character of his simplified forms filled in with heavy but quite precise graphite lines lent themselves well to printmaking but also made for an elegant image that exhibits Niviaqsi’s classic, quietly eloquent style. This sheet is from one of several notebooks (no doubt given to him by James Houston) that were filled with graphite and ink drawings by this remarkable and rather enigmatic artist.

References: For other drawings by the artist in a similar style see Gerald McMaster ed., Inuit Modern, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010) pp. 72-73. See also Walker’s Auctions, Ottawa, 22 November 2017, Lots 16 and 17. For the printed image, see Christine Lalonde and Leslie Boyd Ryan, Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset 1959/2009, (National Gallery of Canada, 2009) pp. 33.