Lidded Vessel

This four-legged vessel, carved from a single piece of wood with a separate cover, can be considered an Nguni master sculptor’s tour de force, primarily intended to dazzle and delight the viewer as a triumphant feat of woodcarving. The ovoid form of the container itself is supported by—and appears to float within—a pedestal superstructure with four square legs that has an anthropomorphic quality. The cover, surmounted by a large, rounded handle with knobs of wood at either side, completes the central oval form. The surface of both the vessel and cover has been filled with deeply incised lines of rounded and soft marks that run in close parallel lines, following the overall shape of the vessel. These lines of surface decoration are arranged into blocks that visually juxtapose verticals and horizontals, and they may be intended to emulate the appearance of woven fabric. The direction of the lines on the inner container are also mirrored on the outer support, increasing the sense of dimensionality. This dramatic decorative surface program is a distinctive characteristic of the works in this school of Nguni sculpture.

The vessel is one of the largest and most significant in a defined corpus of related sculptures that have been attributed to a number of Zulu-speaking carvers, active in the mid-nineteenth century in the vicinity of the former British colony of Natal, in present day Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa (Catherine Elliot, personal correspondence, 11/04/18). The headrest (2018.356) is also considered part of this group. These craftspeople were regionally renowned for their skill in wood carving, and the sculptor responsible for this work would have produced carvings both for a local elite, such as the Zulu King Mpande kaSenzangakhona (r.1840–1872), and for a European clientele, an increasing presence at Port Natal from the 1820s onwards. Major works of sculpture by this group were first exhibited in Europe at world fairs such as the International Exhibition, held in London in 1862, which intended to showcase the fine arts of all nations following the example of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Here, a number of Nguni sculptures were showcased in the ‘Natal Court’ (Elliott, Cartwright and Kevin, 2013: 18).

A contemporaneous inventory of the works on show was compiled by Dr. Robert James Mann (1817–1886). While Mann did not record the names of most of the sculptors, he did attribute an exceptional group of carved wooden objects to “a renowned artisan, named Unobadula” (Mann, 1862 [1]: 18). Works by this artist included a chair “carved out of one block of wood”, a headrest, and “three pots”. Two of these pots were described as having “pedestals” or supportive superstructures—much like this example—and are currently housed in the British Museum (Af.4876 and Af.4875). A photograph taken by Mann of “the wood-carver Unobadula” shows him holding what appears to be a double tiered vessel mounted on a pedestal with a surface of parallel lines (Elliot, Cartwright and Kevin, 2013: fig.5).

About twelve large-scale covered vessels have been recorded in various museum collections. Alongside the examples in the British Museum, the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Natural History Museum in Lille all have important examples. In South Africa, the Brenthurst Collection at the Johannesburg Art Gallery features three important examples. It is unclear what they were used for. Early texts state that they were variously used for beer, known as “rhewu”, and also for milk and butter. According to Mann’s 1862 inventory: “Great potentates…have their beer brought to them in Wooden Pots.” He notes that because of the scale of the vessel, the drinker may have needed to have it lifted on his behalf (Mann cited in Elliot, Cartwright and Kevin, 2013: 19). Such vessels may also have functioned as large-scale tobacco or snuff containers, their monumental scale intended to impress visitors at court, where they might have been reserved for ceremonial occasions alone (Nettleton: 1996). The existence of a spoon with the example in Lille has been taken as an indication that these vessels may originally have been used for culinary purposes, such as containers for porridge.

Analysis of the interior surfaces of the wood, however, has found no residue of substances that the vessel might once have contained (Ellen Howe, personal communication, 08/04/13). Indeed, very few traces of wear or usage exist across the whole corpus (Klopper, personal communication with Alisa LaGamma, 04/08/13). This lack of evident use indicates that the vessel may always have been intended as a stand-alone work of art rather than a functional container. These were either used by local potentates as prestige items, or exhibited at international exhibitions.

James Green, Ph.D.
The Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow, 2017–2018　

Further Reading

Angas, George French. 1849. The kafirs illustrated in a series of drawings taken among the amaZulu, amaPondo and amaKosa tribes ; also, Portraits of the Hottentot, Malay, Fingo and other races inhabiting Southern Africa ; together with Sketches of landscape scenery in the Zulu country, Natal and the Cape colony. London: Hogarth Press.

Elliott, Catherine, Caroline Cartright and Philip Kevin, ‘Maker, material and method: reinstating an indigenously made chair from Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa’ Technical Research Bulletin, British Museum, Vol. 7, 2013: 15 – 30. (http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/BMTRB_7_Elliott_Cartwright_and_Kevin.pdf)

Elliott Weinberg, Catherine ‘The Name of Zulu is Now Given’: Provenancing Objects from Colonial Natal in the British Museum’s Christy Collection’ in Leibhammer, Nessa, and Carolyn Hamilton. 2016. Tribing and untribing the archive identity and the material record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the late independent and colonial periods Voume 2, pp. 475 – 502.

Mann, Robert James 1862. A descriptive catalogue of the Natal contribution to the International Exhibition of 1862.

Nettleton, Anitra ‘Lidded Vessel’, in Musée du quai Branly, Yves Le Fur, David Radinowicz, Susan Schneider, and Sarah Kane. 2009. Musée du quai Branly: the collection: art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Paris: Flammarion, 102.

Nettleton, Anitra C. E. 1991. "Tradition, authenticity and tourist sculpture in 19th and 20th century South Africa". Art and Ambiguity: Perspectives on the Brenthurst Collection of Southern African Art. 32-47.

Nettleton, Anitra 2008. African Dream Machines: Style, Identity and Meaning of African Headrests. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.