Alexander Barker’s Sapi-Portuguese Oliphant

Since Ezio Bassani and William Fagg published their provisional catalogue raisonné of Afro-Portuguese and other associated ivories in Africa and the Renaissance (New York: Center for African Art, 1988) further examples have come to light. The creation of the catalogue has played a part in this, since it provided illustrations of the ivories that have enabled museum curators and private individuals to identify similar objects in their own collections. The most recent addition to the corpus is a Sapi-Portuguese oliphant¹ that formerly belonged to the nineteenth century English art collector and dealer Alexander Barker.²

The evidence that Barker owned such an oliphant has been buried in an obscure pamphlet published by the Arundel Society in 1867 for the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education. It is entitled Classified List of Photographs of works of art in the “South Kensington Museum” (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) and in other public and private collections, “for the use of schools of art” and “the general purposes of public instruction.”³

Among the photographs listed is one, numbered 2309, of two ivory horns said to have been lent to the Museum by Alexander Barker (Fig. 1). The first was described as a “Hunting-horn, in ivory, carved with hunting scenes, crocodiles, and angels supporting a shield of arms. Oriental work”; the second as a “Horn, in carved ivory, with animals, and reptiles, in relief, with inscriptions.” To anyone familiar with the Afro-Portuguese ivories, these descriptions would immediately suggest that the two ivory horns were Afro-Portuguese and from Sierra Leone. Hunting scenes, crocodiles or other reptiles, and European coats of arms are typical elements in the decoration of Afro-Portuguese oliphants from that area. Moreover, in the mid-nineteenth century such ivory carvings were often supposed to be from the Portuguese enclave of Goa in India, which might explain the phrase “oriental work.”

What of the photograph itself? Surely that would settle the matter one way or the other. But here there was a difficulty. Although the 1867 pamphlet states that a complete set of the photographs was available to be consulted in the National Art Library in the V&A, this proved (in 2010) no longer to be the case. All museums periodically engage in “weeding out” operations, in which material deemed to be “surplus to requirements” is disposed of. This seemed from my initial inquiries to have been the fate of the photographs on the 1867 list. The Museum had retained only those photographs in its records which were of objects in its own collections. The others—it was said around 100,000 in total—had been loaned in the 1970s to a university as

1.

Two oliphants in the possession of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1860, formerly the property of the English art collector Alexander Barker (ca. 1797–1873). Photo originally published in the pamphlet Classified List of Photographs in the South Kensington Museum.

2.

Oliphant (mouthpiece not original)

Ivory; carved. H. 46 cm, D. 9 cm

Inv. no. F-635

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Photo: Konstantin Sinyavsky © The State Hermitage Museum

3.

Detail of lower oliphant in Figure 1.

4.

Details of inscriptions on oliphants in Figure 1 (bottom) and Figure 2.

5.

Details of inscriptions on oliphants in Figure 1 (bottom) and Figure 2.

a picture resource. Although they were apparently returned to the Museum in the late 1990s, they were unsorted and in limbo, with no-one seeming quite to know where they were. And in the absence of the photograph of Barker’s horns, one couldn’t be certain that they were Afro-Portuguese; or, if they were Afro-Portuguese, that they weren’t among those already included in Bassani and Fagg’s catalogue raisonné.

There the matter rested until October 2014, when Ella Ravilious, who was...