A beautiful terracotta head, scarred with keloids, with a richly adorned headdress and neck. This type of head is part of a corpus dating from the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. Cast in bronze, carved in wood, or modelled like this one in terracotta, these heads were placed on dedicated altars inside the royal palace courtyard, some serving as pedestals in which a carved elephant tusk was placed. The tradition and sculptural significance of these heads seem to have evolved over the centuries, initially reflecting a tradition of reigning "warrior-chiefs" whose heads placed on altars may have been representations of war trophies, and later depictions of fallen former reigners, or important former figures or Oba honored as part of an ancestor cult, as would appear here, and recognizable by the many superimposed bead necklaces covering the entire lower face right down to the lower lip. According to William B. Fagg, the head from the Evrard de Rouvre collection, visible at the far right of the photo taken in his apartment on Avenue Henri Martin, can be compared with bronze heads of the same type from the early so-called late period, which according to him, in an exchange with its previous owner (Sophie Podgorska in 1964), would date it from the late 18th to early 19th century. Former Kingdom of Benin, Edo population, Nigeria Late 18th or early 19th century Terra cotta, significant visible wear, and very fine age erosion, old collection number under the base (3575). H. 20 cm Provenance : - Sophie Podgorska, Geneva, Switzerland (before 1963) - Collection Evrard de Rouvre, France (acquired from the latter in October 1964) - Passed on by descent