Vessel (early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Vessel (early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Women were and still are responsible for the making of terracotta pots among the Mangbetu. It seems, however, that men added the figurative elements that embellish examples like the one shown here. The depicted head with its elongated skull and halolike coiffure imitates the cranial deformation and hairstyle fashionable among female Mangbetu royalty at the beginning of the 20th century. Typically used for wine, many vessels were also explicitly made for sale to foreigners.

Object facts

• Title: Vessel
• Date: early 1900s
• Culture: Central Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mangbetu, early 20th century
• Type: Vessels
• Technique: terracotta
• Dimensions: Diameter: 17.1 cm (6 3/4 in.); Overall: 35 x 15.6 cm (13 3/4 x 6 1/8 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1992.69

Collection credit

The Mary Spedding Milliken Memorial Collection, Gift of William Mathewson Milliken

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• Smith, Fred T., Judith Perani, Joseph L. Underwood, and Martha J. Ehrlich. The Visual Arts of Africa : Gender, Power, and Life Cycle Rituals. Second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

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.