In his analysis of this box, Brown (1996) writes: "This beautifully designed bent-corner box is unusual in several respects. Most noticeably, the painting features wide, rectilinear bands within the formline designs on each side panel referred to by Bill Holm as 'ultra primary' forms. These unusual shapes were painted first, with the remaining design area adapting to the resultant spatial forms of each side. Ultra primary elements are a highly innovative design technique that appears to have developed among the Haida in the second half of the nineteenth century, and are usually applied to bent-corner dishes and the type of square boxes that have the undulating high-and-low top edges of the bent-dish tradition. The containers with this design application constitute a relatively small number of painted boxes or dishes within the overall NW Coast bent-corner tradition, and this one, made originally as a flat-topped, lidded box rather than a dish type, is an extremely rare combination. In addition, most ultra primary design forms on painted boxes are painted black, with the remaining formline patterns executed in red primary style, while this example shows the opposite color arrangement."