General Pitt-Rivers and the Art of Benin

Abstract

I much enjoyed Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch’s historiographical discussion in African Arts 46 (4) of the reception given to objects from Africa in the early twentieth century (Gunsch 2014). There is a huge amount of work to be done to reassess the work of our predecessors, which—aside from the intrinsic interest of such work—helps us reassess our own efforts, our own assumptions and preconceptions; and Gunsch’s article demonstrates what can be done when the available resources are put to good use. Although I do not necessarily disagree with Gunsch’s general conclusions about the differences between the reception given to African art in Germany and the UK, however, I do want to draw attention to an aspect of her thesis that—I should argue—is in need of revision. Part of Gunsch’s argument consists of a comparison between the work of Felix von Luschan (1854–1924) in Germany and that of Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1827– 1900) in England. Gunsch provides a convincing account of von Luschan’s work, supported by references to the relevant literature, but her account of Pitt-Rivers’s work is unreferenced and misleading. Gunsch writes: “In the largest British collection of Benin works, at the PittRivers Museum, Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt-Rivers arranged all of his African pieces in a ‘chronological’ order based on their perceived sophistication” (Gunsch 2014:26). This claim invites unpacking. To begin with, Gunsch fails to make clear to which museum she is referring. The well-known Pitt Rivers Museum (without a hyphen), where I work, was founded by the University of Oxford in 1884 to house a collection of some 26,000 antiquarian, archaeological, ethnographic, and folkloric artifacts given to it by General Pitt-Rivers. Unsurprisingly, its founding collection did not include anything from Benin, which was not sacked by the so-called Punitive Expedition until thirteen years later. Nor did General Pitt-Rivers pass any Benin objects to the Oxford museum after he began acquiring them in late 1897. Instead, as with all his post-1884 acquisitions, he added them to his “second,” private collection, which he had begun to assemble even before his “first” collection was transferred to Oxford. This “second” collection was housed in Pitt-Rivers’s private museum (often referred to as the Pitt-Rivers Museum; that is, with a hyphen) in Farnham in Dorset and elsewhere on his estate. After Pitt-Rivers’s death in 1900, this private collection remained in the hands of the family until it began to be sold off in the mid-twentieth century. The collection as a whole, and General Pitt-Rivers’s Benin collection in particular, is thus scattered in public and private collections around the world (including, for example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which recently acquired thirteen ex-Pitt-Rivers Benin pieces on loan from Robert Owen Lehman; see Geary 2013).1 It was thus in the private Pitt-Rivers Museum in Farnham, and not in its un hyphenated namesake museum in Oxford, that General Pitt-Rivers’s collection of objects from Benin was displayed. Indeed, it was—in part at least—to display the Benin collection that a new gallery (Room 9) was added to the museum in 1898.2 It apparently took some time for the collection to be installed. It was not referred to in the second edition of the Short Guide to the Farnham museum (which is undated but is known to have been printed in 1900), and was not actually completed until some time after Pitt-Rivers’s death on May 4, 1900 (Saunders 2014:219). As for how it was exhibited, it is difficult to be precise, as no photograph or description survives. What is clear from the records, however, is that the Benin collection was displayed in a separate set of cases. It was not part of an arrangement of “his African pieces in a ‘chronological’ order based on their perceived sophistication.” Rather, it was a self-contained display designed to draw attention to the collection, a catalogue of which Pitt-Rivers prepared with the title Antique Works of Art from Benin (Pitt-Rivers 1900). Moreover, it never was the case that Pitt-Rivers’s “African pieces” were arranged “in a ‘chronological’ order based on their perceived sophistication.” Famously, Pitt-Rivers’s favored mode of display was what he called “typological”; that is, objects arranged by type in evolutionary series—so that all the harpoons, say, or fire-making tools were displayed together in series supposedly demonstrating the succession of ideas Page 1,634 in Volume 5 of the manuscript catalogue of Pitt-Rivers’s “second” collection.