e.g., Petridis 2001: cat. 57). It is reasonable to assume
that Claerhout decided to keep for his own
collection the staff that was obviously inferior
to the one purchased by the museum he worked
for. Interestingly, the White Fathers also owned
a famous round kifwebe-type Luba mask, which
they also lent to the exhibition (fi gs. 15 and 16).
It passed through the collection of Katherine C.
White and is now one of the highlights of the Seattle
Art Museum’s extensive African collection.5
With its typical paddle shape, the ex-Claerhout
staff is striking for the scale of the surmounting
fi gure, which is about 30 centimeters in height.
The particular way the standing woman holds
her hands to her breasts is unusual within the
Luba corpus, even though the iconography is
well understood. Representing either the female
founder of a royal lineage or the king himself, she
makes a hand gesture that indicates the role of
women as guardians of royal secrets. Other noteworthy
features are the many iron tacks inserted
in the cross-shaped coiffure and the long strip of
copper sheet that is spirally wrapped around the
staff’s shaft. As noted by Mary Nooter Roberts
125
When I encountered this sculpture at the Met,
I thought I remembered seeing its image in the
collection of Olbrechts’ sketches at the Antwerp
museum (fi g. 12). My memory was correct, making
me realize that I had erroneously associated
the sketch with the similar but different and uninscribed
object from the Felix Collection, which I
included in the 2001 exhibition. At the time, I believed
that the formal discrepancies between the
Felix double vessel and the one in the Olbrechts
drawing refl ected artistic license. However, as the
details of Olbrechts’ sketch reveal, there is not
the slightest doubt that the Met’s vessel is the
one that was included in the Antwerp exhibition
in 1937–38, when it was in the collection of Jos
(Jozef) Walscharts in Antwerp. The asymmetrical
position of the proper right arm of the female
fi gure and the copper-wire bracelets are specifi c
features that confi rm the match. Judging from the
Olbrechts sketch, it appears that since its inclusion
in Kongo-kunst, the sculpture was repaired
in two places: the proper right foot of the male
fi gure and a portion of the rim above the head of
one of the fi gures.
Two other objects that were displayed in Kongo
kunst but had lost their histories appeared
at auction recently. One is a staff of offi ce in a
classic Luba style that was featured as lot 60 in
Sotheby’s auction in Paris on 24 June 2015 (fi g.
13). Though the staff apparently no longer bears
any inscription, it matches one of the Olbrechts
sketches, and a rubbing of part of the staff’s
striking relief decoration confi rms that it is the
example that was included in the exhibition (fi g.
14). The work’s provenance information in the
auction catalog, though incomplete, at least implicitly
suggests this exhibition history. One of
its cited previous owners, Adriaan Claerhout,
was fi rst curator and later director of what was
to become the Ethnographic Museum in Antwerp.
While the Sotheby’s catalog states that the
“White Fathers” collected it in situ ca. 1961, in
fact Claerhout purchased it from that missionary
society in Antwerp in 1961.4 The White Fathers
lent a number of objects to the Kongo-kunst exhibition.
The Antwerp museum itself also purchased
a number of other Luba objects from the
same source that year, including what I consider
to be one of the most beautiful Luba staffs, which
was also included in the 1937–38 exhibition (see
INSCRIPTIONS