Chokwe Chief's Throne, Angolacitwamo ca mangu height 27in (68.6cm)ProvenanceDr. Romao, part of a collection of Songo and Chokwe material collected between 1885 and 1895 in Angola (Photographed by the Berlin Museum in 1910.)Sotheby's, London, 21 June 1979, Lot 238British Railway Pension FundSotheby's, New York, 8 May 1989, Lot 93American Private CollectionThe backrest with a central female figure with her legs apart and arms outstretched, incised scarification on her stomach and genital area, wearing a Tsishongo headdress, the figure is flanked by a panel with incised geometric designs called manda a mbaci and are derived from the shell of a tortoise, meant to symbolize wisdom, each upright of the back surmounted by a seated figure with the elbows resting on their chins and hands held to their faces; the front legs of the support carved in the form of figures, the right a male with hands bound behind his back, the left a female with her hands at her stomach; the front stretcher with a chief wearing a tsishongo headdress and offering food to four women, presumably his wives, one of which faces away from the chief and being struck on the head by one of the other wives; the right stretcher carved with a birth scene with two male figures in attendance; the left stretcher with two figures copulating; the back stretcher carved in the form of a leopard; the seat of stretched antelope skin; fine, dark-brown glossy patina.'Over the course of numerous encounters with European traders as early as the seventeenth century, Chokwe chiefs appropriated the design of certain types of Western artifacts. The seats of office, or "thrones," of Chokwe chiefs, with backs, leather-covered seats, and decorative brass tacks, are modeled upon European chairs. The decoration of the chair, however, remains distinctly Chokwe in style. The elaborate figurative scenes depicted on this and other seats of office are designed as symbolic microcosms of life and represent the breadth of a leader's concerns and responsibilities' (Metropolitan Museum of Art, WEB, nd)Cf. Leuzinger, Elsy, African Sculpture: A Descriptive Catalogue, Zurich, 1963, p. 309, fig. U15 for a similar Chokwe chair, Collection of André Fourquet, with entire figures carved in the back support, andBastin, Marie-Luise, Afrika Tervuren, vol. VII, "Quelques oeuvres Tshokwe de musées et collections d'Allemange et de Scaninavie," Tervuren, 1961, p. 104, fig. 3 for a chair in the National Museum Copenhagen (no. G4168) with figurative decoration of similar complexity on the stretchers.