Figure, New Georgia, Solomon Islands

Reportedly collected in situ in 1861

Private Collection, Carshalton, Surrey, acquired by descent from the above

James Thomas Hooper, Arundel, acquired from the above in 1943

Christie's, London, Oceanic Art from the James Hooper Collection, June 17, 1980, lot 34

American Private Collection

Sotheby's, New York, May 10, 1988, lot 8, consigned by the above

Acquired at the above auction

James T. Hooper and Cottie A. Burland, The Art of Primitive Peoples, London, 1953, pl. 35a

Steven Phelps, Art and Artefacts of the Pacific, Africa and the Americas: The James Hooper Collection, London, 1976, p. 242, pl. 137, cat. no. 1098 (illustrated) and p. 435, cat. no. 1098 (listed)

The head of this impressive figure is large and powerfully carved, with the complex interplay of concave and convex curves highlighted by the boldly incised linear designs, rimmed with reddish paint, and the inlaid shell around the proper right eye and the jaw. The gaze of the shell eyes is intent. its appearance recalls the canoe prow figureheads of New Georgia, which are known as toto isu in the Marovo Lagoon region, and as nguzunguzu in the Roviana Lagoon region. Like the toto isu or nguzunguzu, the face of this figure is prognathic, its prominence further emphasized here by the wideness of the jaw, which forms the widest part of the head.

Lieutenant Boyle T. Somerville, an Irish naval captain who surveyed New Georgia in 1893-1894, noted that “a great distinction is made in sculptures of ‘debbledebbleum’ (manggota) [spirits] and men (tinoni)”, with the former being characterized by their prognathism, the large size of the face, and “the top of the head terminating almost in a point surmounted with a sort of cap” (Boyle T. Somerville, “Ethnographical Notes in New Georgia, Solomon Islands”, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1897, Vol 26, p. 378).

In the second volume of his “Ethnographical Album of the Pacific”, James Edge-Partington illustrates an overmodeled skull, with features finely modelled in parinarium nut paste, which he attributes to Roviana; it shows several similarities to the present figure in its decoration and particularly in the shape of the mouth, with the corners of the lips pulled back, the better to reveal the teeth (James Edge-Partington, An Album of the Weapons, Tools, Ornaments, Articles of Dress, Etc., of the Natives of the Pacific Islands, London, 1969 [reprinted], vol. 2, p. 99). There is a connection between figures such as this and ancestral skulls; Waite notes that “the positioning of a large standing figure near a shrine containing the skull of a deceased big-man as well as other ancestral skulls was by no means uncommon […]” (Deborah Waite, Solomon Islands Art, Milan, 2008, p. 30). See George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, London, 1910, unnumbered plate, for a photograph taken in Roviana in the 1890s of an ancestor skull shrine, next to which a similar prognathic figure, its hands clasped, stands sentinel.