Museum’s Benin Bronzes Are Reclaimed by Wealthy Collector

Art & Design|Museum’s Benin Bronzes Are Reclaimed by Wealthy Collector

When it began displaying a group of finely crafted treasures from the Kingdom of Benin in 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acknowledged that British soldiers had plundered thousands of such sculptures and other items from that land in 1897.

The collection of some 30 objects — including what the museum described as a “particularly excellent” sculpture of a warrior on horseback — had been lent by a wealthy scion and collector with the promise that over time they would be donated to the museum. To exhibit the works, known as Benin Bronzes, the museum created a gallery that included information about the looting and invited the kingdom’s royal leader, the oba, to the opening.

But several years later a new oba got in touch with the museum, seeking ownership of the items, museum officials said. For several years, they had conversations with the oba’s representatives and the collector, Robert Owen Lehman Jr., about how to handle that request.

Those discussions ended this week with an announcement by the museum that almost all of the items would be going back to Lehman.

“We strive to be a leader in ethical stewardship and reaching judicious restitution decisions,” Matthew Teitelbaum, who took over as the museum’s director in 2015, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we were not able to make progress on a mutually agreeable resolution for our gallery of Benin Bronzes.”

Between 2012 and 2020, the museum said, Lehman donated five of the Benin Kingdom objects to the institution; those are now part of its permanent collection. The museum said it would continue to seek “a resolution regarding the ownership and display” of those items: two relief plaques, two commemorative heads and an 18th- or 19th-century pendant showing an oba and two dignitaries.