Anyone seen anything like this: whale design and whale skin bowl?

Tink · Dec 24, 2011

Any insight to the origin of this bowl will be greatly appreciated. It's big: 21" by 14" at the top, and heavy 12.5 pounds. The sides are 1.5" thick. It has a design of painted on whales and is covered in some kind of hide and because of the design we speculate that it could be whale hide. Our best guess is that it is clay or earthenware underneath the hide. There is no artist signature or mark that we could find. Anyone seen anything like this before? Many thanks for any help and happy treasure hunting!

Broken knee · Dec 25, 2011

Tink, Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride. I think your item was made for the tourist trade. It appears to be a large seal/whale oil lamp
covered in not whale skin but seal skin notice the follicles on the hide. "whales don't have hair" some of these bowls are quite large yours may have been used as a lamp originally then embellished with skin for sale. To use it as intended with oil now the hide would fall off. It seams to be unique I haven't found any other examples with skin. Here are a couple pic's, large and small examples. Maybe someone can shed more light on this? HH :icon_thumright:

Broken Knee
edit to my quote, some whales do exhibit hair. Just not as much as seen on the skin on your bowl.
BK

Tink · Dec 25, 2011

Hi Broken knee and thank you very much for your answer. That makes perfect sense to me. So it appears that this item went from rock, to oil lamp, to bowl, and was a work of art the whole time. In gratitude for you in put. Tink