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BRONZE CEREMONIAL VESSEL, CAMEROON A large fish with its mouth wide open held aloft by a half figure of a man cut off at the waist; details appear in the scales of the fish, the linear qualities of the fin tail and around the wide mouth, and the features of the human face, the two rest on a small oval base with open ends and curled sides which acts as a base to steady the sculpture but could also suggest a boat with a fisherman bringing home a fantastic catch, brass/bronze cast using the lost wax technique 1.42 kg, 31cm high PROVENANCEClayton Holliday CollectionFor the Stephan Welz & Co October 2019 auction, Clayton Holliday provided a biography “In his own words” for the catalogue as Stephan Welz & Co was auctioning his silver. For this sale we are concerned with a few of his African art pieces. As a trained archaeologist with a Fine Arts degree and 17 years of museum experience, in the Mandela Bay Museum (then George VI), Holliday understood the importance of collecting data and hence provided detailed provenances and dates for the pieces, recordings he knew were essential for both present and future histories, he knew too that memory is fallible, so he wrote the relevant facts on small labels which he attached to each piece. Many were acquired in the late 50s when he was working in Zambia, while it was still Northern Rhodesia and predates the independence Zambia in 1964. For one piece he provided more in curled sheets of paper rolled into the body of the bronze Ceremonial Vessel (Lot 422). It was not acquired in the field but at an antique market in 2016 and lacked collecting or any other data so Holliday set out to find out the object’s identity, place of origin, date and possible meaning. The previous owner had cleaned it with Brasso and removed the patina so there was little to be learnt from the surface. Initially Holliday thought the vessel was Asante from Ghana as “cast and decorated examples come from the region and were made in the lost wax technique. The fish motive is used in gold weights and a fish balancing on the head is also well known … I believe it was used as a ritual drinking vessel.” A colleague, Basil Brady, then sent photographs and texts to three individuals who were experienced in bronzes from Africa. One replied that it came from Cameroun and that it is very old. In May 2017 Moustapha (from Cameroun) examined the bronze carefully and concluded that “this brass vase came from west Cameroun next to Ngombe Tikar (Baukine District), from the Merima a small tribe, who used the vase during the initiation of the new in the tribe to grant the king Meriam more power and good luck. It is very old”.