Figure (possibly early 1400s): Art, History and Details

Figure (possibly early 1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The most varied group of soapstone figures and heads has been found in the homelands of the Kissi. Calling them pomda ("images of the dead"), the Kissi placed them in ancestral shrines, offering them the last seeds at sowing times and the first fruits of the harvest. However, the sculptures are believed to have been made centuries ago by the ancestors of the Kissi, the so-called Sapi people.

Object facts

• Title: Figure
• Date: possibly early 1400s
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Sierra Leone, Sapi-style carver
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: soapstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 23.8 x 11.2 x 12.5 cm (9 3/8 x 4 7/16 x 4 15/16 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1976.29

A detail from the museum

Sapi sculptors worked in stone—like in this sculpture—as well as ivory.

Collection credit

Gift of Lucile Munro in memory of her husband Thomas Munro, Curator of Education from 1931 to 1967

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fagg, William Buller, International Exhibitions Foundation, National Gallery of Art (U.S.), William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, and Brooklyn Museum. 1970. African Sculpture; [Loan Exhibition] Circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation, 1970. Washington: International Exhibitions Foundation, p. 17, no. 3.
• Munro, Thomas. Form and Style in the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970, fig. 63.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. 1976 Year in Review. Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland: OH, 1977, no. 2, cat. 36.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.