Bamileke-Bangwa Figure of a King, Fontem Valley, Grassfields, Cameroon

Fontem is the most important of the nine Bangwa chiefdoms in the westernmost part of the area designated as Bamileke in the Grassfields region of present-day Cameroon, and is the origin of some of the most celebrated sculptures in the entire corpus of Sub-Saharan African Art. Major figural sculptures made throughout the Bamileke-Bangwa region are called lefem, and represent Bangwa chiefs, depicted wearing ceremonial dress with rich regalia including ivory bracelets, beaded collars and necklaces, and chiefly headwear. In the Fontem Valley a surrounding region, a style emerged in the 19^th century which is particularly well-represented in canonical museum collections of African Art, rightly celebrated for its high degree of refinement, textural expressiveness, and formal dynamism. Rendering the human form in an unflinching, expressive sculptural style, they emphasize the personality and attributes of a particular fon, or king. The fon of a particular chiefdom was endowed with both civic and sacred power, and his position was both political and religious. Departed members of the lineage of the fon were venerated ancestors, represented by lefem, which were stylistically idiosyncratic and bore features specific to their subject.

The present figure was acquired in 1967 in Cameroon by the French dealer Jean-Michel Huguenin, and was published in Pierre Harter’s monograph Arts anciens du Cameroun, in 1986. It appears there adjacent to perhaps the most famous work of Cameroon art, the so-called “Bangwa Queen”, which was photographed in 1933 by Man Ray and was formerly in the Helena Rubinstein and Harry Franklin collections (Sotheby's, New York, The Harry A. Franklin Family Collection of African Art, April 21, 1990, lot 127). Harter suggests that the present sculpture ‘corresponds’ to the Rubinstein figure, and indeed it bears the same style of collar and necklace, and is morphologically quite similar in the treatment of the legs, body, and arms.