17" x 13"

Unnumbered. Signed and dated.

1970

Beaver is based on a design on a pair of leather leggings featured in the book Primitive Art by Franz Boas. This was Davidson’s first print to feature two colours and many of the principles found on bentwood boxes.

“I had the fortune to do some commission work in Ottawa. I was able to study the box designs in the museum and they had a vast collection of Haida boxes – boxes inside boxes. George MacDonald at the Museum of Man [now the Canadian Museum of History] gave me free rein to see the boxes in the collection. The Field Museum in Chicago also has a large box collection. 

I started to blend one idea into another, creating an image bank from the hundreds of box designs that I had seen, and this was the start of merging ideas from different sources, but the basic design came from the leggings”

- Robert Davidson

Wyatt, Gary, and Robert Davidson. Echoes of the Supernatural: The Graphic Art of Robert Davidson. Figure 1 Publishing, 2022.