Since Ezio Bassani and William Fagg published their provisional catalogue raisonné of Afro-Portuguese and other associated ivories in Africa and the Renaissance (New York: Center for African Art, 1988) further examples have come to light. The creation of the catalogue has played a part in this, since it provided illustrations of the ivories that have enabled museum curators and private individuals to identify similar objects in their own collections. The most recent addition to the corpus is a Sapi-Portuguese oliphant1 that formerly belonged to the nineteenth century English art collector and dealer Alexander Barker.2
The evidence that Barker owned such an oliphant has been buried in an obscure pamphlet published by the Arundel Society in 1867 for the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education. It is entitled Classified List of Photographs of works of art in the “South Kensington Museum” (later the Victoria...