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Lot 28

Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu M.B.E
(Nigerian, 1917-1994)
Hausa Boy

12 October 2021, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £300,250 inc. premium

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Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu M.B.E (Nigerian, 1917-1994)

Hausa Boy
signed and dated 'BEN ENWONWU/ KANO 1949' (lower right)
oil on board
72 x 53cm (28 3/8 x 20 7/8in).

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection.

Enwonwu visited the north of Nigeria before and after his exhibition and lecture tour of the United States in 1950. Many of the paintings and sculptures exhibited during this tour were of northern Nigerian themes; Head of a Hausa, Hausa Girl and Dogari Kano City, for example.

Enwonwu toured extensively around Nigeria during this period, however he did not wish for his art to be viewed as ethnographic. During this same period (1949), the colonial government commissioned the French painter, Maurice Fievet to provide ethnographic documentation of Nigerian landscapes and people. The fact that Enwonwu and Fievet overlapped from 1949 to 1952, is, as Ogbechie writes, "the strongest evidence yet that Enwonwu's representation of Nigerian subjects cannot be categorised as genre paintings in the same manner that commentators of that era characterized Fievet's production."

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