A bronze sculpture - Hunter - Benin - Nigeria
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Holds a postgraduate degree in African studies and 15 years experience in African art.
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A bronze sculpture from Nigeria attributed to the Benin culture, titled A bronze sculpture, with provenance linked to the Kingdom of Benin in Edo and indicating northern frontier workshop influence (Igala/Igbirra).
AI-assisted summary
Description from the seller
Hunter with Antelope and Panther
Kingdom of Benin (Edo), probably northern frontier region (Igala/Igbirra), Nigeria
Bronze, lost-wax casting (cire perdue)
Probably 17th–18th century
The history of this remarkable bronze begins long before its present appreciation as a work of art. It tells a story of royal representation, ritual practice, colonial displacement, and the changing ways in which African art has been understood. Its biography is as significant as its exceptional craftsmanship.
The sculpture depicts a hunter kneeling on his right knee, carrying a slain antelope across his shoulders. At his feet stands a panther wearing a quadrangular bell around its neck, while bow and quiver clearly identify the figure as an accomplished hunter. Within the Kingdom of Benin, hunting was far more than a means of subsistence. It embodied courage, discipline, and spiritual authority. The hunter operated at the threshold between the ordered world of the royal court and the powerful, potentially dangerous realm of the forest. The successful pursuit of large game such as antelope was therefore both a demonstration of physical prowess and an expression of ritual knowledge. The panther at his feet is more than a companion. As lord of the forest, it symbolizes power and royal legitimacy, referring to the exclusive hunting privileges granted by the Oba.
Stylistically, this bronze differs from the better-known court sculptures of Benin City. Its slender proportions, expressive facial modelling, and certain iconographic features suggest production within the northern sphere of influence of the Benin Kingdom, possibly in the Igala or Igbirra (Ebira) region along the Niger River. Such regional workshops illustrate the remarkable artistic diversity that flourished within the political and cultural orbit of the Benin Kingdom.
Like all Benin bronzes, this sculpture was produced using the sophisticated lost-wax casting technique. Each casting required a unique wax model that was destroyed during the casting process, making every sculpture an unrepeatable work. The dark brown and green surface preserved today bears witness not only to natural ageing but also to traces of its original ritual use. Palm oil, sacrificial offerings, smoke, and centuries of handling contributed to the formation of a patina that may be understood as the material memory of the object itself.
This surface is of particular importance. During the 1960s and 1970s many Benin bronzes in European museums were subjected to aggressive conservation treatments in which historically developed patinas were removed in an attempt to restore the appearance of newly cast metal. This example, by contrast, has largely retained its original surface. From today's conservation perspective, this patina is no longer regarded as an impurity but as an integral part of the object's history and an invaluable historical source.
A profound turning point in the biographies of many Benin sculptures occurred in 1897. During the British Punitive Expedition against the Kingdom of Benin, numerous works of art were removed from their original cultural context and dispersed throughout Europe. For many objects this marked the beginning of a new, predominantly Western object biography, while their earlier African histories can now only be reconstructed in fragments.
Projects such as Digital Benin make an important contribution by connecting dispersed objects, historical photographs, and archival sources, while documenting their provenance with increasing transparency. However, they can only partially reconstruct an African object biography. Much of an object's original significance—its ritual context, patterns of use, ownership, and place within local memory—was never recorded in written form. What emerges most clearly today is therefore the history of these works within Western collections and museums, rather than the full complexity of their earlier lives in Africa.
This bronze tells far more than the story of a hunter. It speaks of the extraordinary skill of Edo bronze casters, of the political and spiritual significance of hunting, of the ruptures created by colonial history, and of an object whose meanings have continually evolved over the centuries. Each generation inscribes its own interpretation upon it. It is precisely this layered object biography that makes the sculpture an outstanding testament to the artistic and cultural history of West Africa.
Selected Biliography
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ben-Amos, Paula Girshick. The Art of Benin. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.
Dark, Philip J. C. An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Ezra, Kate. Royal Art of Benin: The Perls Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992.
Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020.
Kopytoff, Igor. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process." In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Plankensteiner, Barbara (ed.). Benin – Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria. Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, 2007.
Digital Benin. Digital Corpus of Benin Cultural Heritage.
Ife/Benin exhibition Gallery Wolfgang Jaenicke, Berlin, 2018 (last photo sequence).
TL Anaysis Kotalla 520 years +/-23,4 %
XB//D//1//23//457
The seller guarantees and can prove that the object was obtained legally. The seller was informed by Catawiki that they had to provide the documentation required by the laws and regulations in their country of residence. The seller guarantees and is entitled to sell/export this object. The seller will provide all provenance information known about the object to the buyer. The seller ensures that any necessary permits are/will be arranged. The seller will inform the buyer immediately about any delays in obtaining such permits.
Seller's Story
Wolfgang Jaenicke’s engagement with African art did not begin in the field or the marketplace but in a quieter, more inward space—among papers, books, and objects that belonged to his father. The archive on Germany’s former colonies was not arranged to tell a single story; it suggested many. It invited scrutiny rather than reverence, and it taught Jaenicke early on that objects are never mute. They carry time inside them—fracture and continuity held in the same form—and they ask to be read as carefully as texts.
For more than a quarter century, Jaenicke has worked as a collector, dealer, and intermediary, though none of these terms quite captures the shape of his practice. What used to be grouped, too casually, under the heading of “Tribal Art” has never appeared to him as a sealed or historical category. It is, instead, a set of living traditions, constantly negotiating the present. His academic training—in ethnology, art history, and comparative law—provided a grammar. The language itself he learned elsewhere. In Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana, knowledge emerged slowly, through repeated encounters that hardened into relationships, and through trust built not all at once but over years.
Mali became the gravitational center of this experience. Between 2002 and 2012, Jaenicke lived and worked in Bamako and Ségou, where he ran Tribalartforum, a gallery overlooking the Niger River. The space resisted easy chronology. Sculptures and ceramics shared the room with photography, and works by Malick Sidibé—images of Malian youth in the 1970s, self-assured and exuberant—hung alongside older ritual forms. The effect was not nostalgic but clarifying: past and present did not cancel each other out; they sharpened one another.
The war of 2012 ended this chapter abruptly, as wars tend to do. But it did not dissolve the work. Together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke regrouped in Lomé, closer to the places where many of the objects originated and to the routes they continue to travel. Since 2018, Berlin has become another point on this map. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke now operates opposite Charlottenburg Palace, supported by a small team of specialists. Its focus rests, in particular, on West African bronzes and terracottas—materials shaped by earth and fire, and by forms of memory that resist easy translation.
What distinguishes Jaenicke’s practice is not only its geographical range but its internal tension. Fieldwork is paired with provenance research; commerce is treated as inseparable from responsibility. In collaboration with museums and scholarly initiatives, circulation is framed not as extraction but as an ethical process that remains unfinished. The aim is not to remove objects from the world and seal them off, but to keep them readable within it—to allow them to continue speaking, even as the conditions of their speech change.
------------
Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke is a Berlin-based gallery specializing in West African sculpture, bronzes, terracottas, masks, and contemporary African art. It is directed by Wolfgang Jaenicke, whose work combines collecting, dealing, provenance research, fieldwork, and archival documentation.
According to the gallery’s own account, Jaenicke studied ethnology, art history, and comparative law and has worked in the field of African art for more than twenty-five years. His activities developed through long-term engagement in countries including Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo. Rather than presenting African art as a closed historical category, he describes it as a continuing cultural tradition shaped by living communities and changing historical contexts.
A particularly important phase of his career was in Mali, where he lived and worked between roughly 2002 and 2012 in Bamako and Ségou. There he operated Tribalartforum, a gallery that combined historical African sculpture with contemporary African photography, including works by Malick Sidibé. The political and military crisis in Mali in 2012 led to the closure of this phase of activity.
Later, together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke continued working from Lomé, Togo, before establishing a gallery presence in Berlin near Charlottenburg Palace. The gallery places particular emphasis on West African bronzes, terracottas, Benin and Ife-related works, Nok sculpture, Dogon art, Baule sculpture, Senufo objects, and Yoruba material.
One distinctive aspect of Jaenicke’s public position is his repeated emphasis on provenance transparency and restitution debates. On several published object records, the gallery explicitly discusses issues surrounding export documentation, UNESCO conventions, ownership histories, and communication with scholars and restitution researchers. These statements reflect broader contemporary debates about the circulation of African cultural heritage, legality, collecting history, and museum acquisition practices.
The gallery maintains extensive online archives and catalogues documenting hundreds of African objects, including Benin and Ife bronzes, Nok terracottas, Dogon sculptures, Baule figures, Fon objects, Moba figures, and other West African material.
For researchers interested in the history of the African art trade, Jaenicke represents a later generation of dealers compared with figures such as John J. Klejman. Whereas Klejman belonged to the postwar New York market of the 1950s–1970s, Jaenicke’s work has been shaped by contemporary concerns with field documentation, provenance research, restitution discussions, digital archives, and direct engagement with West African networks and artists.
This text is based on AI Information
Hunter with Antelope and Panther
Kingdom of Benin (Edo), probably northern frontier region (Igala/Igbirra), Nigeria
Bronze, lost-wax casting (cire perdue)
Probably 17th–18th century
The history of this remarkable bronze begins long before its present appreciation as a work of art. It tells a story of royal representation, ritual practice, colonial displacement, and the changing ways in which African art has been understood. Its biography is as significant as its exceptional craftsmanship.
The sculpture depicts a hunter kneeling on his right knee, carrying a slain antelope across his shoulders. At his feet stands a panther wearing a quadrangular bell around its neck, while bow and quiver clearly identify the figure as an accomplished hunter. Within the Kingdom of Benin, hunting was far more than a means of subsistence. It embodied courage, discipline, and spiritual authority. The hunter operated at the threshold between the ordered world of the royal court and the powerful, potentially dangerous realm of the forest. The successful pursuit of large game such as antelope was therefore both a demonstration of physical prowess and an expression of ritual knowledge. The panther at his feet is more than a companion. As lord of the forest, it symbolizes power and royal legitimacy, referring to the exclusive hunting privileges granted by the Oba.
Stylistically, this bronze differs from the better-known court sculptures of Benin City. Its slender proportions, expressive facial modelling, and certain iconographic features suggest production within the northern sphere of influence of the Benin Kingdom, possibly in the Igala or Igbirra (Ebira) region along the Niger River. Such regional workshops illustrate the remarkable artistic diversity that flourished within the political and cultural orbit of the Benin Kingdom.
Like all Benin bronzes, this sculpture was produced using the sophisticated lost-wax casting technique. Each casting required a unique wax model that was destroyed during the casting process, making every sculpture an unrepeatable work. The dark brown and green surface preserved today bears witness not only to natural ageing but also to traces of its original ritual use. Palm oil, sacrificial offerings, smoke, and centuries of handling contributed to the formation of a patina that may be understood as the material memory of the object itself.
This surface is of particular importance. During the 1960s and 1970s many Benin bronzes in European museums were subjected to aggressive conservation treatments in which historically developed patinas were removed in an attempt to restore the appearance of newly cast metal. This example, by contrast, has largely retained its original surface. From today's conservation perspective, this patina is no longer regarded as an impurity but as an integral part of the object's history and an invaluable historical source.
A profound turning point in the biographies of many Benin sculptures occurred in 1897. During the British Punitive Expedition against the Kingdom of Benin, numerous works of art were removed from their original cultural context and dispersed throughout Europe. For many objects this marked the beginning of a new, predominantly Western object biography, while their earlier African histories can now only be reconstructed in fragments.
Projects such as Digital Benin make an important contribution by connecting dispersed objects, historical photographs, and archival sources, while documenting their provenance with increasing transparency. However, they can only partially reconstruct an African object biography. Much of an object's original significance—its ritual context, patterns of use, ownership, and place within local memory—was never recorded in written form. What emerges most clearly today is therefore the history of these works within Western collections and museums, rather than the full complexity of their earlier lives in Africa.
This bronze tells far more than the story of a hunter. It speaks of the extraordinary skill of Edo bronze casters, of the political and spiritual significance of hunting, of the ruptures created by colonial history, and of an object whose meanings have continually evolved over the centuries. Each generation inscribes its own interpretation upon it. It is precisely this layered object biography that makes the sculpture an outstanding testament to the artistic and cultural history of West Africa.
Selected Biliography
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ben-Amos, Paula Girshick. The Art of Benin. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.
Dark, Philip J. C. An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Ezra, Kate. Royal Art of Benin: The Perls Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992.
Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020.
Kopytoff, Igor. "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process." In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Plankensteiner, Barbara (ed.). Benin – Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria. Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, 2007.
Digital Benin. Digital Corpus of Benin Cultural Heritage.
Ife/Benin exhibition Gallery Wolfgang Jaenicke, Berlin, 2018 (last photo sequence).
TL Anaysis Kotalla 520 years +/-23,4 %
XB//D//1//23//457
The seller guarantees and can prove that the object was obtained legally. The seller was informed by Catawiki that they had to provide the documentation required by the laws and regulations in their country of residence. The seller guarantees and is entitled to sell/export this object. The seller will provide all provenance information known about the object to the buyer. The seller ensures that any necessary permits are/will be arranged. The seller will inform the buyer immediately about any delays in obtaining such permits.
Seller's Story
Wolfgang Jaenicke’s engagement with African art did not begin in the field or the marketplace but in a quieter, more inward space—among papers, books, and objects that belonged to his father. The archive on Germany’s former colonies was not arranged to tell a single story; it suggested many. It invited scrutiny rather than reverence, and it taught Jaenicke early on that objects are never mute. They carry time inside them—fracture and continuity held in the same form—and they ask to be read as carefully as texts.
For more than a quarter century, Jaenicke has worked as a collector, dealer, and intermediary, though none of these terms quite captures the shape of his practice. What used to be grouped, too casually, under the heading of “Tribal Art” has never appeared to him as a sealed or historical category. It is, instead, a set of living traditions, constantly negotiating the present. His academic training—in ethnology, art history, and comparative law—provided a grammar. The language itself he learned elsewhere. In Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana, knowledge emerged slowly, through repeated encounters that hardened into relationships, and through trust built not all at once but over years.
Mali became the gravitational center of this experience. Between 2002 and 2012, Jaenicke lived and worked in Bamako and Ségou, where he ran Tribalartforum, a gallery overlooking the Niger River. The space resisted easy chronology. Sculptures and ceramics shared the room with photography, and works by Malick Sidibé—images of Malian youth in the 1970s, self-assured and exuberant—hung alongside older ritual forms. The effect was not nostalgic but clarifying: past and present did not cancel each other out; they sharpened one another.
The war of 2012 ended this chapter abruptly, as wars tend to do. But it did not dissolve the work. Together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke regrouped in Lomé, closer to the places where many of the objects originated and to the routes they continue to travel. Since 2018, Berlin has become another point on this map. Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke now operates opposite Charlottenburg Palace, supported by a small team of specialists. Its focus rests, in particular, on West African bronzes and terracottas—materials shaped by earth and fire, and by forms of memory that resist easy translation.
What distinguishes Jaenicke’s practice is not only its geographical range but its internal tension. Fieldwork is paired with provenance research; commerce is treated as inseparable from responsibility. In collaboration with museums and scholarly initiatives, circulation is framed not as extraction but as an ethical process that remains unfinished. The aim is not to remove objects from the world and seal them off, but to keep them readable within it—to allow them to continue speaking, even as the conditions of their speech change.
------------
Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke is a Berlin-based gallery specializing in West African sculpture, bronzes, terracottas, masks, and contemporary African art. It is directed by Wolfgang Jaenicke, whose work combines collecting, dealing, provenance research, fieldwork, and archival documentation.
According to the gallery’s own account, Jaenicke studied ethnology, art history, and comparative law and has worked in the field of African art for more than twenty-five years. His activities developed through long-term engagement in countries including Mali, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Togo. Rather than presenting African art as a closed historical category, he describes it as a continuing cultural tradition shaped by living communities and changing historical contexts.
A particularly important phase of his career was in Mali, where he lived and worked between roughly 2002 and 2012 in Bamako and Ségou. There he operated Tribalartforum, a gallery that combined historical African sculpture with contemporary African photography, including works by Malick Sidibé. The political and military crisis in Mali in 2012 led to the closure of this phase of activity.
Later, together with Aguibou Kamaté, Jaenicke continued working from Lomé, Togo, before establishing a gallery presence in Berlin near Charlottenburg Palace. The gallery places particular emphasis on West African bronzes, terracottas, Benin and Ife-related works, Nok sculpture, Dogon art, Baule sculpture, Senufo objects, and Yoruba material.
One distinctive aspect of Jaenicke’s public position is his repeated emphasis on provenance transparency and restitution debates. On several published object records, the gallery explicitly discusses issues surrounding export documentation, UNESCO conventions, ownership histories, and communication with scholars and restitution researchers. These statements reflect broader contemporary debates about the circulation of African cultural heritage, legality, collecting history, and museum acquisition practices.
The gallery maintains extensive online archives and catalogues documenting hundreds of African objects, including Benin and Ife bronzes, Nok terracottas, Dogon sculptures, Baule figures, Fon objects, Moba figures, and other West African material.
For researchers interested in the history of the African art trade, Jaenicke represents a later generation of dealers compared with figures such as John J. Klejman. Whereas Klejman belonged to the postwar New York market of the 1950s–1970s, Jaenicke’s work has been shaped by contemporary concerns with field documentation, provenance research, restitution discussions, digital archives, and direct engagement with West African networks and artists.
This text is based on AI Information
Details
Indigenous object name
Hunter
Ethnic group/ culture
Benin
Country of Origin
Nigeria
Material
Bronze
Sold with stand
No
Condition
Fair condition
Title of artwork
A bronze sculpture
Height
52 cm
Depth
20 cm
Weight
12.6 kg
Authenticity
Original/official
Sold by
GermanyVerified
protop
Rechtliche Informationen des Verkäufers
- Unternehmen:
- Jaenicke Njoya GmbH
- Repräsentant:
- Wolfgang Jaenicke
- Adresse:
- Jaenicke Njoya GmbH
Klausenerplatz 7
14059 Berlin
GERMANY - Telefonnummer:
- +493033951033
- Email:
- w.jaenicke@jaenicke-njoya.com
- USt-IdNr.:
- DE241193499
AGB
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