Benin in Boston 83 he gave his First Collection to the University of Oxford, where it became the foundation for the Pitt Rivers Museum. By 1880, after he inherited a large country estate called Rushmore in Dorset from a relative, he focused on a second collection, which included ethnographical holdings—an area that had caught his interest.8 He converted a schoolhouse on the estate’s grounds into a private museum and employed assistants and artists to document his growing holdings in a nine-volume catalog, now deposited at the Cambridge University Library. 9 His intent was for his private museum to assist in educating the working classes—and so it did for the people who toiled on his estate and lived nearby. When the Benin works arrived in London in 1897, they immediately caught Pitt-Rivers’ attention, and he acquired more than 300 pieces for his Second Collection from dealers and from military men or their relatives. He was so passionate about the works that he published an illustrated book, Antique Works of Art from Benin, Collected by Lieutenant General Pitt- Rivers, which appeared in 1900, the year of his death. The title of the book is telling, for he assigns the works “art” status at a time when pieces from Africa were considered merely ethnographica or artifacts. His introduction, “Works of Art from Benin, West Africa, obtained by the punitive expedition in 1897, and now in the General Pitt Rivers Museum at Farnham, Dorset,” is brief, no more than two pages, recounting the way in which the objects had left Benin as result of the Punitive Expedition. In a telling passage, he reveals his admiration for the works when he writes, “... their real value consists in their representing a phase of art—and rather an advanced state—of which there is no actual record ....”10 A MOUNTED RULER Several objects occupy prominent places in Pitt-Rivers’ Benin publication, among them a bronze sculpture of a mounted ruler, commonly referred to as “horseman,” which is now a centerpiece in the MFA’s Benin Kingdom Gallery (fig. 2). It belongs to a small corpus of similar sixteenth-century figures that have received much scholarly attention.11 Dressed in exquisite garments, this rider may represent Oba Esigie, who triumphed in war, or even Prince Oranmiyan, who founded the kingdom’s current royal dynasty sometime in the twelfth century. He holds a lance, a plaitedcane shield, and a bundle of spears. The projection on top of his feather headdress is part of an ancient crown and contains ritual substances. This sculpture of a mounted ruler was among several works initially in the possession of medical doctor Felix Norman Ling Roth, a participant in the Punitive Expedition. 12 He gave them to his brother Henry Ling Roth, who had a deep interest in anthropology, science, and museums. The latter sold it along with a bronze double gong (fig. 5) to Pitt-Rivers.13 The entry for the mounted ruler in the museum’s catalog states: “1898, May 11 bt. bought of Mr. H. Ling Roth, 32 Prescot St. Halifax.”14 It cost £20, the equivalent of around £1,900 today. Considering that the average earnings of a worker at the end of the nineteenth century were about £65 per year, Benin works were expensive even when they first ap- FIG. 7: Commemorative head of a defeated neighboring leader. Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria. Late 15th–early 16th century. Copper alloy, iron. H: 21 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Robert Owen Lehman Collection. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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