Lot: 200

Anthropomorphic spoon

Côte d'Ivoire, Yaure

Provenance	Size	Starting price / estimated price
Private Collection, Paris, France Marceau Rivière / Galerie Sao, Paris, France Galerie Éric Hertault, Paris, France	H: 7.2 inch	5000 EUR / 10000 EUR

wood, pigments, small crack (handle), base Extremely fine carving of outstanding quality. The handle end of the small spoon is carved with a finely carved mask representing a ram "bla". Such elaborately decorated spoons were always owned by important and wealthy men in earlier times. A spoon with a very similar stylistic and delicacy of workmanship, which could possibly have come from the same workshop, depicted in Homberger, Zurich 1990, p. 49, fig. 23. In this canon of forms, there is a spoon from the Félix Fénéon collection, which was already collected before 1935 (AHDRC 0062299).

Homberger, Lorenz (Hg.), Löffel in der Kunst Afrikas, Zürich 1990, p. 49, ill. 49 Sweeney (James Johnson), "African Sculpture", Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1970: fig.54 (AHDRC 0062299)