Anthropomorphic neckrest ·  D. R. Congo, Mbala · ID: 3053582

Description

wood, handwritten collection number “4” on the underside

Possibly made by Master Molime or his workshop; for comparable items, see AHDRC 0203877, 0017499 and 0163781.

Three examples were acquired by the ethnographer Emile Torday during his fieldwork amongst the northern Mbala (1905–1907) and are now held in the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Further neckrests are held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the British Museum, the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and in major US collections, including the Penn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. The small number of known comparable examples in international museum collections underlines the exceptional rarity of this type.

According to Tim Teuten and Emilie Jolly, only around twelve examples of this rare and distinctive form of neck rest from the northern Mbala were previously known to exist in museum collections. This neck support can be included in the canon. A characteristic feature is the stocky Janus-like figure with two faces and long, outstretched arms, which supports the broad headrest. The documented pieces were predominantly collected during the first decades of the 20th century.