Canada is a bit player in the world’s biggest art restitution story – and that’s good news.
Four Canadian museums hold a total of 11 objects from the Kingdom of Benin, the historic African civilization whose art was looted by British troops in 1897 and is now scattered through Western institutions.
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Benin objects include a 19th-century commemorative head.Supplied
One of the clearest examples of colonial theft in the museum world, the objects widely known as the Benin Bronzes are at the heart of an international campaign to document the art and negotiate its return.
Restitution has been complicated, however, by disagreements over the rightful owners. Originally, the state of Nigeria, which covers the territory that was once historic Benin (not to be confused with the contemporary Republic of Benin next door), laid claim, with the agreement of the international community. This summer some support has emerged for returning the art to a descendant of the kings to whom it originally belonged, the Oba whose ownership was backed by a Nigerian presidential decree last year.
For example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington transferred 29 works to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments in 2022. Yet, in July, an art museum at the University of Iowa confounded the museum community by deciding to give two artifacts to the current Oba, Ewuare II, a traditional ruler in Nigeria’s Edo state who was crowned in 2016.
The objects take their name from the most spectacular pieces, the remarkably detailed and naturalistic plaques of human figures and life-size heads made of bronze or brass; the plaques decorated the Oba’s palace walls while the heads were commemorative portraits. However, the category also includes items made of iron, ivory and wood.
The artifacts, the artistic wealth of the kingdom, were looted in 1897 after a bloody trade dispute between Britain and Benin.
Founded in the 11th century, Benin was a wealthy state controlling trade on the west coast of Africa and the Niger River. In the late 19th century, Britain, which obtained palm oil and ivory from Benin and was colonizing its neighbours, forced an exclusive trade treaty on the Oba. Complaining its terms were not being met, the British organized a parlay with the Oba that went disastrously wrong, leading to the massacre of 250 British troops. The British retaliated with the Benin punitive expedition, killing hundreds, burning the capital and looting the Oba’s palace. Thousands of objects wound up in European and North American museums, some donated by descendants of the officers who had looted them; others purchased on the art market.
However, very few items found their way to Canada.
A 16th or 17th century brass plaque, the oldest Benin artifact in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.Supplied
“We are pretty far down the list,” said Stéphane Aquin, director at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the largest Canadian custodian with merely five Benin items in its collection. The British Museum in London holds the largest group of all with 944 items. Montreal’s collection includes three bronze and brass pieces that typify Benin artistry. One is a plaque, about 50 centimetres high, showing a Benin courtier holding a ceremonial hammer and wearing a bowler hat of a kind adopted from Portuguese traders. It dates to the 16th or 17th century, and is the oldest and most significant of Montreal’s objects.
The collection also includes an 18th-century brass staff topped by a bird and two other metal figures from the 19th century, a pendant mask and a commemorative head commissioned by one Oba after his predecessor’s death. The collection also includes a ceremonial carved ivory tusk that would have been placed with a commemorative head on an altar. The plaque, the head and the tusk are all on display in the MMFA’s galleries dedicated to global art.
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto also has a 19th-century tusk and a wooden commemorative head, and one of the brass plaques from the palace walls, forged by the brass-makers guild in Benin and dating to the mid-16th century. Its fourth artifact is a small bronze figure of a warrior that postdates the looting.
A late-19th century carved ivory tusk from the historic kingdom of Benin, now in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.Royal Ontario Museum
LEFT: A brass relief plaque, dating to the mid 16th century, of the kind that covered the walls of the Oba's palace in historic Benin, now in Nigeria's Edo state. and RIGHT: A wooden commemorative head from historic Benin, dating to the 19th century. Both from the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.Royal Ontario Museum
None of the ROM’s objects are on display but they are listed in Digital Benin, a project run out of Hamburg’s Rothenbaum Museum of World Cultures with international and Nigerian participation. Launched in 2020, it aims to establish a complete digital catalogue of all the scattered Benin art. Currently, it lists 5,285 objects from 136 institutions in 20 countries. Only 400 objects are located in Nigeria.
As well as listing their objects on Digital Benin, the ROM and the MMFA participate in the Benin dialogue group. European museums and Nigerian institutions launched the group in 2010 with the goal of seeing the objects reassembled in a museum in Benin City in Edo state. The Nigerian participation includes both its museums commission and the local Edo government but also the Royal Court of Benin. Jesus College at Cambridge became the first to restore an object, handing over a bronze cockerel to the museums commission in 2021 in a ceremony at which the Oba’s brother was present.
The situation seemed relatively straightforward – the art should be returned to Nigeria via the museums commission – until 2023 when outgoing president Muhammadu Buhari published a decree stating the bronzes should be returned to Ewuare.
In July, the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa caused some consternation when it returned a brass plaque and wooden altarpiece directly to Ewuare, the first U.S. institution to favour the royal claim. In an interview with the Art Newspaper, Stanley director Lauren Lessing said: “It is not my job to tell people what to do with their own possessions. The two works of art restituted were stolen from the Oba of Benin in 1897, and they belong to him.” She added that Ewuare has expressed interest in making international loans.
The competing claims, however, have stalled restitution. The Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University was about to return 116 objects when the presidential decree was circulated and the plan was put on hold. Similarly, Germany has paused a 2022 agreement that eventually would have seen more than 1,000 objects returned from its museums.
The ROM says it will continue to participate in the Benin dialogue group while the MMFA says it will wait for Nigerians to resolve the complex issue.
“I don’t think we’d be the first in line to be asked,” Aquin said, pointing to multiple museums that hold hundreds of Benin objects. He also noted that in terms of artistic quality and historic value only Montreal’s 17th-century plaque would be considered particularly desirable.
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia only has an undated brass and copper arm cuff bought from a London gallery in 1960, but the Canadian Museum of History’s single object is an interesting one: a bronze bell with a human face using a casting technique that would date it to the 16th century and workshops outside of Benin, in the area of the lower Niger.
It arrived at the Canadian museum in 1970, but it’s a good example of the way these objects can be traced back to the looting. It was collected in 1897, probably by W.D. Webster, a member of the punitive expedition, and then sold to Augustus Pitt Rivers, the British general and collector for whom the museum at Oxford University is named. Today the Pitt Rivers holds 148 objects and says it is following Nigerian developments closely.
Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.