Staff (1800s–1900s): Art, History and Details

Staff (1800s–1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is The Baboon Master (probably Tsonga peoples).

The work and its context

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

Arguably the finest surviving carving of the Baboon Master in a Western collection, this staff features exceptionally sophisticated articulation and detailing. The circular pokerwork motif on one side—which echoes the treatment of the ears on the male heads supporting the baboon—may represent a shield or a leaf. The heads feature the characteristic ornament that signifies maturity and marriage; covered with a mixture of gum, charcoal, and oil, this hairdo, called isicoco, employed a fiber or sinew ring into which the wearer’s hair was woven.

Object facts

• Title: Staff
• Date: 1800s–1900s
• Creator attribution: The Baboon Master (probably Tsonga peoples)
• Culture: Africa, South Africa, South Africa or Mozambique, probably Tsonga peoples
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 120.7 cm (47 1/2 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 2010.204

A detail from the museum

Artists working on the African continent often moved from place to place; the artist nicknamed The Baboon Master was of the Tsonga culture and worked in the Zulu kingdom.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sotheby's. "African and Oceanic Art." New York, Nov. 11, 2005, lot 161 and frontispiece.
• Franklin, David and C. Griffith Mann. Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art; London: Scala Publishers Ltd, 2012. Pg 246-7.
• Petridis, Constantine. "African Master Carvers." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 57, no. 2 (March/April 2017): 32-33.

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.