Standing figure of cast brass/bronze, representing a hornblower, sounding a sideblown horn, wearing a hat with feather, collar of leopard's teeth, decorated chest covering and wrapper: West Africa, Nigeria, Edo State, Benin, 17th - 18th century
HORNBLOWER FIGURE, cast brass. NIGERIA, Benin; 17th or 18th century. Standing male figure of an Oba's hornblower playing a sideblown horn. He wears a feathered cap, a collar of leopard's teeth, a decorated chest-covering secured by straps across his sides, & a wrapper with an elaborate upturned tie ornamented at the hip with a leopard's mask. Cast in brass using the lost-wax method. Condition: complete, except for the loss of the top part of the cap feather, & two broken teeth at the back of the collar. An imperfect cutting with much contemporary patching on the back & sides. See: Supplementary File; "New Benin Discoveries in Scotland", by Dale Idiens, African Arts 14 (4), August, 1986, 52. Wider World Gallery Label Text, 2001: Hornblower. Nigeria, Benin. Seventeenth or eighteenth century. Cast brass figure of court attendant playing an ivory horn. He wears a hat with feather (damaged), a collar of leopard's teeth, a decorated chest covering secured by straps, and a wrapper with an elaborate upturned tie ornamented at the hip with a leopard mask. Three-dimensional figures of various forms were manufactured to stand on the altars of the obas (kings) in the palace courtyard. The hornblower figures are the rarest, and until the example here was discovered in Greenock, only four others in this style were known to exist. One belongs to a private collector on the continent, one is in a museum in Berlin, and two (including a badly damaged example) are in the British Museum, London. || The four Benin figures (A.1985.630-633) were donated to the McLean Museum and Art Gallery, 9 Union Street, Greenock in 1925 by Sir William Northrup McMillan (a wealthy American of Scots descent). The McLean Museum and Art Gallery lent the four figures to the Royal Scottish Museum on 1 February 1973 (A.L.468.1-4). The Inverclyde district Council (then responsible for the McLean Museum and Art Gallery), Municipal Buildings, Greenock sold the four figures to the Royal Museum of Scotland on 18 November 1985.
Artistic Legacies, 2011-07-29 - present, National Museums Scotland, National Museum of Scotland || Benin - Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria, 2007-05-08 - 2008-09-21, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Museum Für Völkerkunde || Art UK Sculpture (online aggregator ArtUK)
Idiens, Dale, New Benin Discoveries in Scotland, African Arts 14 (4), August 1986, 52