FEATURE 122 months of his stay he had also taken responsibility for caring for A. B. Lewis. Just back in the Netherlands, he made an appearance at the international exhibition in Tilburg. This photograph of Hamers in front of the display case, surrounded by objects of the Marind-Anim, is probably the last picture ever taken of him. Shortly after the exhibition he died unexpectedly at age forty-one. The display cabinet used in the Internationale Tentoonstelling 1913 came straight from the mission museum of the MSC in Tilburg, as is clearly visible in an undated photograph showing part of this museum (fig. 9). This vaguely shows the contours of some of the sculptures, but they are not arranged next to each other. This was not the case in 1916, as evidenced by an article in the Tilburgsche Courant: “such a museum is of course one-sided by nature. It only contains collections from the mission stations … In the displays there are light wooden sculptures standing elbow to elbow covered in white lime, their knees bent. They are singular human figures. Such a splendid series of such figures, all of the same type, doesn’t exist anywhere else. They are ancestral figures of the Gambas, a tribe to the west of the Noordwest River on the southern coast of New Guinea; Father Viegen was there; every house has one or more of these ….”26 A month later, the same newspaper returned to the subject in a short article called “Wood Sculptures from New Guinea”: “Writing about the museum in the Mission House in Tilburg, we reported to you about some singular wooden sculptures exhibited there … it might be an idea to incite Father Viegen to confess what he knows about these sculptures. As we wrote: he brought them from a tribe living along the banks of the Noordwest River, who were called Gambas, at least by the exploration detachment, as the inhabitants only dared to approach when the members of the detachment called out ‘gambas,’ which means friend. It is with some justification that the collector, when sending his collection over, warned that they should be kept together until he had found a chance at a later time to write about them, making use of his notes. Father Viegen should write about his curious finds, and not at a later time, but very soon. He wrote down the promise to return to the many curiosities he saw. But this promise has remained unfulfilled in the years since.”27 This is the only source informing us that Father Viegen really did keep notes about the sculptures he collected among the Asmat and that he intended to write about them. There is every appearance that Viegen never got around to working up his notes. One thing is certain: When in 1919 he once again set foot on Dutch soil, “his” area the Apostolic Missionary school of the Sacred Heart will put together a splendid zoological and botanical museum …”23 A Rotterdam newspaper dedicated a full article to the education pavilion, which under no circumstance was to be skipped by the visitors, as Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina had made known that she intended to visit this specific pavilion. The paper was full of praise about this part of the exhibition, albeit with some exceptions: “the entrance of the pavilion houses a contribution by the Apostolic School of the Mission House … of the Sacred Heart, from the lands they send their missionaries out to, New Guinea in particular … one can see various objects and stuffed birds. Especially a group of sculptures on the left side, originating from the Gambas, a people living along the Noordwest River of Dutch New Guinea, stands out by its extreme ugliness.”24 I have not been able to find anything else in newspapers about the MSC installation in this exhibition, but this brief aside raises an important question: Who told this journalist that these sculptures had been collected along the Noordwest River? Most likely Brother Hamers. De Katholieke Illustratie (The Catholic Illustrated), the largest Dutch Catholic weekly magazine of its time, also devoted some attention to the MSC with relation to this exhibition. They did not write anything about the content of the installation but did print a photograph of it (fig. 8). The caption reads, “Of the most interesting and important Internationale Tentoonstelling 1913 in Tilburg, the contribution of the Mission of the Sacred Heart … with products and objects from the mission countries. The Reverend Brother Hamers, who was stationed in Merauke for more than eight years, poses in front of the display.” 25 The meager text in the newspapers and the only surviving photograph of this exhibit form a nicely rounded whole (although probably not every taxidermist or ornithologist will agree with me). Only a year after Viegen had collected the figurative sculptures, they stood on top of a display cabinet in Tilburg looking down upon the visitors shuffling by, Queen Wilhelmina being one of them. The grainy reproduction in the magazine makes it difficult to identify the figures on top of the display as the surviving sculptures, but it is possible. To do this, it is important to consider the proportions and the positions of the limbs and extremities. But should the original photograph ever surface, I would probably first zoom in on the face of the small bearded man standing in front of the display. Brother Hamers had been the carpenter in Merauke and had personally built many of the buildings at the mission post. He had been through hard times and during the last few FIG. 19: Ancestor figure F, obtained from the MSC missionary house in Tilburg in 1928. It is visible in figs. 9 and 11. Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. 436-1.
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