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Tolai animal carving

Tolai animal carving

19th century
Object PlaceGazelle Peninsula, New Britain, Papua New Guinea
Medium/TechniqueStone
Dimensions20.5 in. l x 11.75 in. h x 5.5 in. w
Credit LineBequest of William E. Teel
Accession number2014.148
On View
Not on view
ClassificationsSculpture
ProvenanceBetween about 1902 and 1911, acquired on the Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain, Papua New Guinea by Father Joseph Meier and transferred to the Mission Museum of the Sacred Heart, Hiltrup-Münster, Germany; 1941, Mission Museum closed [see note]; about 1971/1972, contents of Mission Museum sold en bloc to Thomas Schultze-Westrum, Munich; probably about 1980, sold by Schultze-Westrum [see note 2]. February 22, 1982, sold by Wayne Heathcote (dealer), New York, to William and Bertha Teel, Marblehead, MA; 2014, bequest of William Teel to the MFA. (Accession Date: February 26, 2014)

NOTES: [1] Joseph Meier, “Steinbilder des Iniet-Geheimbundes bei den Eingebornen des nordöstlichen Teiles der Gazelle-Halbinsel, Neupommern (Südsee),” Anthropos 6, no. 5 (1911), p. 853, pl. 1, no. 11. See Rebecca Loder-Neuhold, "Crocodiles, Masks and Madonnas. Catholic Mission Museums in German-Speaking Europe," Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 2019, pp. 244-283 on the Mission Museum of the Sacred Heart. She discusses the banning of Iniet secret societies by the colonial German government and, in particular, by missionary societies (pp. 281-283). It was at this time of suppression and conversion that missionaries like Joseph Meier took Iniet figures as ethnographic objects for German museums. In his 1911 article (pp. 850-851) Meier discusses how difficult it was to obtain such figures, and how sacred and secret they were considered to be.

[2] Information about the building and dispersal of the Schultze-Westrum collection is taken from an essay by Michael Hamson, available at https://oceanicart.com/PROVENANCE/Thomas-Schultze-Westrum/1.