Female Figure Representing Africa

Entry

The continent Africa is personified here as an elegant black woman making a dance step. Around her neck, she wears a double string of pearls; encircling her ankles are bands with small bells. She has textured hair, with a lengthy headscarf worn around the head and tied at the back in a bow. Her appearance follows the general iconography applied to African women in the seventeenth century, traceable to depictions and images from travel literature and cartography concerning Africa, including Pieter de Marees’s Beschryvinge ende historische verhael van’t goudt koninckrijck van Guinea (Description and Historical Story of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea) from 1602, and Olfert Dapper’s Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaanse gewesten (Precise Description of African Regions), published in 1668.¹ With this specific work, the use of ivory for the personification of Africa has added significance, being in a certain sense self-referential, i.e. carved from a material referring to the continent where elephant tusks used for such purposes originated. At the same time, however, the ivory’s colour – in the West, commonly associated with the white skin of Europeans – negates the dark skin colour of the African continent’s inhabitants.²

The present statuette was acquired in 1894, together with a second ivory statuette personifying Europe (BK-NM-9784). When accompanied by corresponding figures of Asia and America, these ivories would originally have formed an ensemble representing the Four Continents, a common theme in sculpture, but seldom encountered in ivory. An ivory allegorical figure representing America is preserved in Vermont.³ While stylistically comparable to the Rijksmuseum duo, its larger dimensions (h. 17 cm) excludes the possibility it belongs to the same series.

Presumably based on the style and design, Leeuwenberg localized the present pair in the Northern Netherlands and dated them to circa 1660. Evident stylistic parallels with baroque ivory carvings from the Low Countries are nevertheless lacking. Far more convincing are parallels with the work of the north-German ivorycarver Joachim Henne (active 1663-1707), a court artist in the traditional sense. Henne’s precise biographical dates are unknown, but his earliest documented activity occurs in the years 1663 to 1665 in Hamburg, followed by employment at the ducal court of Schleswig-Holstein at Gottorf. From 1671 to 1676, he worked in Copenhagen at the court of the Danish king Frederick III and his successor, Christian V. In the early 1690s, his name again (or still) appears in that same city, albeit in the capacity of miniaturist painter and stamp-cutter. The last court Henne is known to have attended, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, is that of King Frederick I of Prussia in Berlin.⁴ Art historians have ventured a possible sojourn in the Northern Netherlands during the early phase of Henne’s career on stylistic grounds, though this cannot be substantiated by documentary evidence.⁵

Striking similarities between the present ivories and Henne’s work can be observed in the faces, hair and ample physical form of the figures in a number of his ivory reliefs. Suitable examples for comparison include the angels in an Adoration of the Shepherds from 1675 that bears Henne’s monogram,⁶ and various female nudes, such as those he produced in Denmark, today found in the collection of Rosenborg Castle (Copenhagen) and elsewhere.⁷

Bieke van der Mark, 2025