Herbert Ward (1863-1919)

The subject of a tribesman dancing holding aloft an idol is drawn from Herbert Ward’s travels in the Congo as described in his book Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, London, 1890 (the illustration ‘The Antics of the Charm Doctor’ clearly has a relationship to this sculpture, p. 41). The present bronze is possibly cast from a preliminary sketch which was worked up into the life-size bronze titled The Sorcerer in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

Ward was an English explorer, once in the service of the Congo Free State and a member of Henry M. Stanley's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Inclined towards art as a youth, he set up a studio in London in about 1890, moving his family to Paris a decade later and exhibiting frequently, and winning medals, at the Paris Salon. He created sculpture reflecting his informed fascination with Africans and African life and assembled in his studio "a great collection of curios second only to that of the King of the Belgians."