Ama (Plaque of a War Chief, Warriors and Attendants)
- L9
Palace of the Oba, Kingdom of Benin, 17th century-1897 [1];
Acquired in Benin by Captain Ernest Percy Stuart Roupell (1870-1938), London and Benin City, 1897-September 23, 1898 [2];
Purchased from Roupell by William Downing Webster (1868-1913), Bicester, Oxfordshire and London, stock no. 5845, September 23-October 15, 1898 [3];
Purchased from Webster by Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827-1900), Rushmore, Wiltshire, England, October 15, 1898-1900 [4];
By descent to his son, Alexander Edward Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1855-1927), Rushmore, Wiltshire, England, 1900-1925;
By descent to his son, Captain George Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1890-1966), Hinton St. Mary, Dorset, England, 1925-probably the 1950s [5];
With J. J. Klejman, New York, by November 1957;
Purchased from J. J. Klejman by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.
NOTES:
[1] This plaque is one of more than 900 plaques that were removed from the Palace of the Oba and nearby palace storerooms during the British colonial occupation of Benin, which occurred during the reign of Oba Ovonramwen (Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, b. ca. 1857-d. ca. 1914). The United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs gave 203 plaques to the British Museum, where they remain today. The additional plaques were sold by the British government or removed from Benin by British soldiers and later sold privately.
[2] Ernest Percy Stuart Roupell was a British military officer assigned to the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893. He arrived in Benin City on March 1, 1897 and was appointed the British Resident and Political Officer from 1897 to 1898. His report of interviews he conducted in November 1897 with elders and officials of the Benin court is one of the first recorded descriptions of the Benin plaques. See Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, The Benin Plaques: A 16th Century Imperial Monument (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 4-5, 46-47, 114-115.
[3] Webster was a British dealer and collector who purchased numerous objects from soldiers returning from the Benin occupation. William Downing Webster Stock book: Collection number range 1 to 9834, Museum of New Zealand-Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand, Collected Archives Collection, CA000229. This plaque was part of a group of seven objects—including four plaques—that Webster bought from Roupell for £104 15s 6p.
[4] Pitt-Rivers purchased this plaque from Webster for £28 10s. It was on display in Pitt-Rivers’ museum at Farnham, Dorset, England, most likely for the duration of its ownership by the Pitt-Rivers family.
See “General Fox-Pitt-Rivers: catalogues of his collection,” MS Add.9455, volume 5, p1745, Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives.
[5] The dispersal of the Farnham museum objects is not well documented, but some of the Benin objects were sold by private sale in the 1950s. See Peter Saunders, “’The Choicest, Best-Arranged Museums I Have Ever Seen’: The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset, 1880s-1970s,” Museum History Journal 7, no. 2 (July 2014): 222, n. 34.
Felix von Luschan, Die Altertümer von Benin (Berlin and Leipzig: Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger, Walter De Gruyter & Vo, 1919), 109-110, 128, (repro.).
Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 253, (repro.).
Franco Monti, Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’art, vol. 7, les arts primitives (Paris: Hachette, 1964), 1372, (repro.).
Sir John Rothenstein, ed., New International Illustrated Encyclopedia of Art, vol. 1 (New York: Greystone Press, 1967), 77, (repro.).
Michael Batterberry and Ariane Ruskin, Primitive Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 143-44, (repro).
Ross E. Taggart, George L. McKenna and Marc F. Wilson, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 2, Art of the Orient, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 240-41, (repro.).
Richard L. Anderson, Art in Primitive Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979), 136-37, (repro.).
Philip J.C. Dark, An Illustrated Catalogue of Benin Art (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 2.1.3.
Ellen R. Goheen, The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 228-29, (repro.).
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 84, (repro.).
Joyce M. Youmans, “African Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,” African Arts 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 41, 43, (repro.).
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 243, 245, (repro.).
Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, The Benin Plaques: A 16th Century Imperial Monument (New York: Routledge, 2018), 227.
