Lot Essay
Roger Neich has kindly identified this bowl for us as by Wero Taroi or his pupil, Anaha Te Rahui, Rotoruan carvers from the Ngati Tarawhai group working in Rotorua during the last quarter of the last century. He illustrates a famous covered bowl in the Auckland Museum, known as "the two wrestlers", carved by Anaha for his friend Captain Gilbert Mair in the catalogue for the exhbiition Gauguin and Maori Art (Auckland, 1995, p.48, fig.43), the cover of which has two carved splayed figures facing each other and with their arms about each other: a sketch by Gauguin of one of these figures is illustrated on the following page. In Captain Mair's bowl we find the same degree of realism to the heads of the splayed figures on the cover, contrasting with the beaky faces of the support figures. This type of bowl is used by Gauguin in the composition of Still Life with Sunflowers and Mangoes, 1901, in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich (no.58 in the Auckland exhibition's catalogue)