A FINE SOLOMON ISLANDS INLAID CEREMONIAL SHIELD

PROPERTY FROM AN AMERICAN PRIVATE COLLECTION

Details

A FINE SOLOMON ISLANDS INLAID CEREMONIAL SHIELD
Santa Isabel

Of elongated tapering oval form with two rows of worked shell inlays on the periphery with a standing stylized human figure in the center, two areas of curved forms at the top and bottom, a human head shown upside down between the legs of the figure, two profile heads in the center, the shell set into alternating bands of red and black colored paste, basketry, parinarium nut paste, shell inlay, black and red pigment, lower left bottom damaged, 30¾in. (78.1cm.) high

Provenance

Charles Ratton, Paris

Lot Essay

This shield falls into the group of twenty-one which was catalogued by Deborah Waite in 1983. As she did not know the existence of this particular example, the corpus has now increased by one. Because of the fragility and delicacy of their construction, these shields were all made for prestige display, not combat. According to Waite, they were created between 1840 and 1855 by a single artist or workshop on Santa Isabel Island. This example is quite similar to two in The Fuller Collection at The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (nos. 26870 and 26871, see Force and Force, 1968, p. 215). The two profile heads in the center are rare details, known on only two other examples, one in The Masco Collection, and the other in The Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh (see Wardwell, 1994, p. 136).