Digital Benin

Stevens Auction Rooms (1834 - 1945)

Description

J. C. Stevens Auction Rooms specialised in the sale of natural-history specimens, curiosities and antiquities. The auction house was located at 38 King Street, Covent Garden, London. Founded around 1759 by the bookseller Samuel Patterson, the company was taken over by Thomas of Foster Lane in 1824. John Crace Stevens (1809–1859) joined the firm as a partner in 1831. The company name was changed to J. C. Stevens in 1834 and remained the same for the rest of the firm’s history, even after John’s death. John’s brother Samuel (1817–1899) joined the firm as a partner in 1840. He left in 1848, but oversaw the company again after John’s death for several years until his son Henry (1843–1925) was old enough to inherit the business in 1863. During this period, Stevens Auction Rooms was the best place in London to acquire African wildlife, taxidermy pieces, and more. Stevens organised the sale of four Egyptian mummies in 1898 and thirty-three embalmed Maori heads in 1902. The firm continued after Henry’s death, but closed in the 1940s as the popularity of natural-history sales waned (for a complete history, see Allingham, 1924). The first sale of objects from the Kingdom of Benin at Stevens’ took place in August 1897 and was followed by a much larger sale in 1898, ‘Carved Tusks and other trophies from Benin City collected by naval officers in the recent expedition’. Augustus Henry Pitt-Rivers bought his first Benin Bronzes there. The prices gradually increased as word spread about the Benin Bronzes. From 1897 to 1909, Henry Stevens presided over the sale of hundreds more bronzes (Stevens, 1897; Stevens, 1898; Stevens, 1898; Stevens, 1902; Stevens, 1909). Stevens exploited the gruesome image given to the Kingdom of Benin by the British press (as the ‘City of Blood’) for commercial opportunity. Testimonies from expedition members were used to sell the pieces as war souvenirs (Bodenstein, 2022, 106-107). The auction house was a consistent source for the British dealer William Downing Webster, who also chose Stevens to sell off his personal collection in 1904. Even after Henry Stevens died in 1925, the link to Benin pieces remained in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the officers who’d taken part in the British Military Campaign on Benin passed away during this period, and their private collections massively went up for auction at Stevens. Ralph Frederick Locke's pieces (Stevens, 1928) were sold on 3 January 1928 and those of Norman Burrows in April 1923 (Phillips, 2021, 200-204 ; 218-222).

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Roles

Auction House

Places of contact

London, UK

External biography links

Wikidata Link