African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 1400-1800 - Book Review

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by William Hart

Ezio Bassani

British Museum Press, London, 2001. xxxix 328 pp., 615 b/w photos, CD-ROM. 85 [pounds sterling] hardcover.

The publication of this book, the culmination of decades of work by Ezio Bassani, is a major event in the art history of Africa. It answers the call made by Jan Vansina in 1984 for "a systematic reference catalogue [for Africa] listing all known objects and all iconographic representations for different periods of time" (1) and shows how much can be achieved for the history of African art by a thorough investigation of original archival and visual records. This is Bassani's second such endeavor: in 1986 he identified a number of African works of art and artifacts known to have been in Europe before 1700 for an exhibition at the Musee Dapper in Paris; (2) but his new work, which includes a CD-ROM of the text, (3) is on an altogether more ambitious scale.

In his foreword Bassani explains the organization of the catalogue and briefly sums up what a survey of the material reveals. There is an opening essay on early collections and collectors of African art, and four appendixes dealing with specific groups of early African art: oliphants from Calabar; two seventeenth-century Kongo wooden figures, attributed by Bassani to a Master of Bamba Ngo; Kongo art in general; and the Afro-Portuguese ivories. With the exception of the appendix on the wooden figures, these repeat or summarize discussions that the author has given elsewhere, but it is useful to have them brought together.

The sub-Saharan material is divided into three groups totaling 818 objects: (4) first, items that can be documented as having been in European (or American) collections before 1800 and whose present location is known or unknown (nos. 1-681); second, items known from illustrations to have been in Europe or America before 1800 but are otherwise unidentifiable (nos. 682-96); and third, items whose present location is known and which we can assume, by analogy with other documented objects, to have been in Europe by 1800, although their presence cannot be documented (nos. 697-818).

The catalogue is an impressive work of scholarship. It lists, country by country, the original museums or private collections in which early sub-Saharan artifacts have been identified and gives a brief account of their history. Bassani provides a separate description for each object, including its dimensions, the materials of which it is made, its present location, and (where this can be determined) its provenance and the ethnic group with which it is associated. He cites early manuscript or printed sources, together with the earliest verbatim description of the object in those sources. Most items are illustrated by a photograph. One can only guess at the research and detective work that has gone into the bald details recorded for each piece. Bassani generously acknowledges the help of museum curators and other scholars who contributed information to the catalogue--the list of names takes up two and a half pages--but he has undoubtedly been the pioneer and the prime mover in the whole enterprise.

The scope of the objects described will surprise many. They range from virtuoso works--elaborate ivory carvings such as the Afro-Portuguese saltcellars and oliphants--to humble everyday items such as leather sandals, raffia mats and bags, and articles of clothing. The catalogue, includes an assortment of weapons: bows and arrows, swords and spears. However, masks and wooden figure sculptures that we nowadays take to be typical of African art hardly feature at all. There is a solitary mask (from Senegambia: no. 282) and only four wooden figures (two from Kongo, two from Sierra Leone/Guinea: nos. 268, 514-15, 573). (5)

With this catalogue Ezio Bassani has put future researchers in African art history in his debt and confirmed his reputation as a leading authority in the field. His decision to include objects that either have not survived or cannot now be located is a sensible one. Some may come to light in the future, and in any event it is better to have a fuller record of the sorts of African artifacts that Europeans of past centuries thought worth collecting. Where one might quibble, however, given that the catalogue aims to list objects in Europe by 1800, is Bassani's inclusion of some objects that are only known from nineteenth-century records, such as the items from the Crosthwaite and Hutton Museums (listed in a catalogue and a handbill dated 1826 and 1831 respectively); those objects may well have been acquired after 1800. On the other hand a future edition of the catalogue, or supplement to it, should find a place for the incontrovertibly pre-1800 "piece of Cloth from Eboe, and from the Gold Coast, in Africa" listed in the 1786 catalogue of Richard Greene's Lichfield Museum, (6) and the African "rarities" recorded as being at Adams's coffee house or tavern, the Royal Swan, in London in the 1750s. (7)

I have a suggestion to make about one of the objects listed. The ivory carving (no. 265) now in the Reserve of the Bibliotheque de Saint-Genevieve in Paris, which is described speculatively as a "staff" or "club," is surely a section of a siwa horn, examples of which are still to be found today in certain coastal towns of east Africa such as Lamu. Since it is firmly documented as having been in France in the 1690s, it corroborates Swahili oral traditions that trace those horns back several centuries. It is, one notices, the only object in the catalogue that can be definitively linked to east Africa.