EO.1953.32.36

One hundred grave statues from Angola

The Belgian painter Robert Verly (1901-1963) found this grave statue in a cemetery in the Noqui district of Angola, then a Portuguese colony, sometime between late 1950 and early 1953. By his own account, he bought the statue from a local  chief. In total, Verly managed to get his hands on some one hundred grave statues. In June 1953, he sold 38 of them to the museum in Tervuren. He sold the rest to the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, to other European museums, and to private collectors. 

Legal questions 

Following the purchase, the then museum director, Frans Olbrechts, queried how Verly had come into possession of the grave statues. Olbrechts probably did not act out of genuine concern, but rather out of dissatisfaction that Verly had not offered the entire ensemble to the Tervuren museum. 
In interviews and writings, Verly said that, after much negotiation, he had persuaded a number of chiefs to sell the statues, and to do so with one goal in mind: to make their culture, art and history more widely known.

An object found in this cemetery that one has been able to purchase following endless palavers, must be paid to the head of the clan to which the ancestor belongs on whose grave the object was discovered, since it remains absolutely the property of this clan.  

Verly R., Les Mintadi. La statuaire de pierre du Bas-Congo (Bamboma – Mussurungo), Louvain, Revue Zaire, 1955: p. 37.

The African perspective on Verly’s ‘discoveries’ is, as so often, missing from the archives. At the time, Angolan newspapers were already questioning the legality of Verly’s actions. The Portuguese government did not pursue the matter further, perhaps for diplomatic reasons. On a later visit to the colony however, Verly was given an explicit ban on collecting.