Ethnographica & Tribal Art

A South Pacific ula throwing club and a Maori canoe bailer that once belonged to an English reverend killed by cannibals in Vanuatu in the 19th century has sold at an auction at Duke's Auctioneers in Dorchester.

An African headrest soared past its upper estimate to take £65,000 at a recent Edinburgh auction.

A collection of Maori artefacts with an unbroken provenance dating back to their acquisition by early English missionaries to New Zealand will be offered for sale at John Nicholson’s of Fernhurst on October 5.

There was some good old-fashioned auction drama at the Elgin Auction Centre in Morayshire on August 23 when two lots of loosely-catalogued tribal clubs sold to online bidders for a combined £46,500.

Some good old-fashioned saleroom drama ensued at Ewbank’s of Send in Surrey on December 1 when a tribal art necklace estimated at £60-100 sold to a buyer from Continental Europe at £99,000 (plus 22.5% premium).

The Parcours des Mondes, Paris' annual tribal trail and one of the biggest commercial gatherings in this collecting area, opened on September 6.

Pablo Picasso is revered as a key pioneer of Cubism, the radical approach to representing reality that he spearheaded with Georges Braque in the early 1900s. As with so many art movements, its roots extend further back, however.

South Pacific war clubs continue to strike high prices at auctions, as this Tongan example sold in Stafford this month shows.

Bonhams throw down the gauntlet at Irma Stern Museum after Strauss & Co's China Girl TV stunt

Lady Jane Franklin (1791-1875) gained worldwide admiration for her efforts to trace her husband’s disappearance on his fatal 1845 voyage seeking the North West Passage.

This 17in (43cm) Fang bieri guardian palmwood figure from Gabon in West Africa set a house record at Netherhampton Salerooms in Salisbury when it sold for £88,000.

ALL 49 lots from the Murray Frum collection of Oceanic art found a buyer on September 16 at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in Paris. The hammer total was €6.24m (£5.2m).

As the summer break ends, next month sees a rush of activity in the art world with a flurry of events not least in the Tribal Art category.

Maori boat-shaped feather boxes – or ‘waka huia’ – are infrequent visitors to UK salerooms so it was unusual to see two examples sold in close proximity this summer.

The first stand-alone tribal art sale held by Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury was topped at £44,000 by this 19th or early 20th century Yombe seated figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Last October, South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, London hosted an exhibition of artworks in the image of, and inspired by, Nelson Mandela.

In the islands of the Pacific, where hardwood trees were abundant and iron virtually non-existent until the 19th century, the fighting club was elevated to an art form – made in a wider variety of forms and with more lavish decoration than any other weapon.

To great publicity last November Martel Maides of Guernsey sold a collection of Fijian cannibal forks for close to £30,000. They were the property of a local collector, who had bought them privately in the North Midlands three or four decades ago – the same vendor who entered an Aboriginal parrying shield to the auctioneer’s sale last month with hopes of £3000-4000.