The mask, to be auctioned in February next year with an estimate of £5 million (N1.25 billion), is thought to have been worn by the then Oba of Benin city on ceremonial occasions. Only four other ivory masks of this age and quality are known, all of which are in museums.
Standing at 22cm high, the mask is being sold by the descendants of one Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Lionel Gallwey, deputy commissioner and vice-consul in the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1891, who took part in the infamous Punitive Expedition of 1897 in what is now southern Nigeria.
In response to the massacre of a previous British-led invasion force, naval and protectorate troops deposed the king and captured, looted and burnt the city of Benin.
The admiralty confiscated most of the booty and auctioned it off to defray the costs of the expedition, although a sizeable group ended up in the British Museum. Among them is another of the same group of ivory masks.
The technical skill of these cast bronze and ivory ritual sculptures astounded western audiences, and the dispersal of the Benin treasures paved the way for a reassessment of African art by artists and scholars. When Jacob Epstein saw this piece in an exhibition in London in 1947, he asked the family if he could exchange it for one of his sculptures.
Its whereabouts remained unknown until the family contacted Sotheby’s last year. Jean Fritts, director of African and Oceanic art at Sotheby’s, said: “It has an amazing, untouched surface which collectors love. Its honey colour attests to years of rubbing with palm oil.” From the same collection, and offered alongside, are a carved altar tusk, two ivory armlets, a rare bronze armlet cast with Portuguese figures and a bronze sculpture usually described as a tusk stand. A bronze head of an Oba of around 1575-1625 was sold for a record $4.7m in 2007. The auction record for any African work of art is €5.9m.
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