A Benin bronze sold off by the British Museum for around £200 in the 1950s came back on the market at Quinn’s Auction Galleries in Falls Church, Virginia on 1 October with an estimate of $800,000-$1.2m—but failed to find a buyer.
The 16th-century plaque, depicting a warrior chief holding a ceremonial sword, was among 500 objects offered from the collection of the New York-based African-American artist, collector, dealer and musician Merton Simpson, who died three years ago. Photographs showed that it had been substantially restored and this may have discouraged buyers.
The piece had originally adorned the palace of the Oba (king) of Benin, in present-day Nigeria. Hundreds of plaques were looted by British troops during the Punitive Expedition against the Oba in 1897, and the British Museum acquired 203 bronzes from the Foreign Office the following year.
In 1950, the museum’s keeper of ethnography, Hermann Braunholtz, suggested to the trustees that 30 plaques were “duplicate specimens” and that 10 should be sold to Nigeria for a planned museum in Lagos. Later that year, four further plaques were sold to the London dealer Sydney Burney for a total of £876; three others went in 1952 to the New York dealer John Klejman for £450 in a exchange deal.
The British Museum would later much regret these sell-offs. In 2002, Nigel Barley, the museum’s Africa curator, described them as “a curse”, since the plaques had been designed to be displayed as pairs.
