Benin in Boston 87 FIG. 13: Portuguese soldier. Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria. 16th century. Copper alloy, iron. H: 40.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Robert Owen Lehman Collection. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. pieces in the Robert Owen Lehman Collection are more difficult to reconstruct. In some instances, they reflect the vagaries of the ways in which objects—which very likely arrived in England as a result of the Punitive Expedition— moved through families into the public. A magnificent bronze commemorative head of an oba has perhaps the most amazing story of all (fig. 12). It belongs to a group of bronze memorial heads created over several centuries by the bronze casters who worked exclusively for the king. When an oba joined the ancestors, his successor would commission such a head to honor his father and celebrate his accomplishments. They became part of ancestral altar ensembles in the palace and supported decorated ivory tusks—a valuable material associated with royal power. Based on stylistic analysis, several scholars date pieces such as this one to the sixteenth century, the middle period of their production.33 The trajectory of this royal commemorative head could not have been reconstructed without the help of Hermione Waterfield, the founder and long-term head of the tribal art department at Christie’s auction house in London. She remembers vividly how it came to Christie’s attention before it was auctioned off to art dealer Alexander Martin on December 3, 1968. She wrote that, according to her recollection, “It arrived unannounced in Christie’s together with a fine large carved ivory tusk. I had just enlisted the help of Bill William Buller Fagg the authority at that time on Benin, head of the African section at the British Museum, and later Keeper to describe anything African that might be entrusted to Christie’s for sale hoping to build up a department. He was delighted to see the quality of the head and we contacted the consignor Mr. Hope to find out more. It had been used in the greenhouse to hold potted plants, luckily in the dry section, and drawn the attention of a policeman friend of Mr. Hope’s. He suggested that it was rather too good to be used in such a manner and offered to take it to an auction house. ... The owner had no idea how the two items came to be in his possession. I seem to remember they were left behind by the previous owner.”34 A PORTUGUESE SOLDIER A fine Portuguese soldier in the Lehman Collection is part of a corpus of similar Portuguese figures including one in the National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria (fig. 13).35 The Portuguese were a favorite motif of Benin artists and their workshops, who produced these figures over a long period of time. Bronze casters skillfully depicted this musketeer in every detail—his facial features, his armor, musket, powder horn, rapier, and even the cord wrapped around his wrist. His dynamic stance is unusual within Benin artistic conventions, which favor frontality and symmetry. The soldier stands barefoot on a now-damaged base with the relief of a cannon and cannon balls barely visible on top. By 1960, it was in the possession of Julius Carlebach, a well-known dealer, who operated a gallery in New York City. THE MAHIN HEAD Among the works whose location was unknown for decades is the famous Mahin head, an enigmatic piece that left present-day Nigeria before the Punitive Expedition (fig. 14). Sometime between 1880 and 1885, the amapetu (king) of the coastal kingdom of Ugbo-Mahin gave this piece as a present to the German agent Eugen Fischer, a Lagos-based representative of the Hamburg
CoverT70 FR corr_Layout 1
To see the actual publication please follow the link above