Aina Onabolu

Biography

The story goes that in 1904 Aina Onabolu painted a portrait in front of an audience. The colonial officials of Lagos did not believe an African capable of such pictures and suspected that Europeans were slipping into his house at night to help him. By then he had been taking commissions for some years already.

He was born on 13 September 1882 in Ijebu-Ode, into a family of traders. In the early 1890s, after the British annexed the region, he went to school; children were then encouraged to take English names, and at primary school he was, it seems, known as J. Aina Roberts. He began to draw by copying illustrations from European magazines and religious books, the cheap reproductions that reached Nigeria, and by the age of twelve he was already making visual charts for teachers. From 1895 he lived in Lagos in the house of the physician and politician Dr J. K. Randle, from whom he took his view of the colonial order; he later painted Randle. In 1899 he finished school, a year later he took a post in the Marine Department, and in his free time he taught himself: he ordered paints and books on the technique and history of painting from a London art shop. His first exhibition, of drawings, still lifes, landscapes and portraits, was held in 1901 at Randle’s house, and after it clients appeared. The portrait of Mrs Spencer Savage of 1906 is sometimes called one of the first significant works in Nigeria painted in the European manner.

There was no academy in the country, and he remained self-taught until almost forty.

Around 1915 he began pressing for drawing to be taught in the schools of Lagos. His offer to teach without pay was turned down by the colonial administration: the officials let it be understood that the limit of an African’s abilities was pottery and craft. Onabolu taught the children around him and, unofficially, in the few schools that allowed it, and he realised that without a formal diploma no one would listen to him. On 27–30 April 1920 he showed a large exhibition, “Pictures of Onabolu”, at the Empire Hall in Lagos; a few weeks before it he had taken back the name Onabolu. For the exhibition he printed a “Short Discourse on Art”, in which he argued that the basis of modern African art should be academic painting in the tradition of Joshua Reynolds: mastery of it would refute any talk of the mental inferiority of Africans. In Europe in those same years artists, Picasso first among them, were discovering African sculpture; Onabolu was walking straight towards them. Almost immediately after the exhibition he left for a two-year course at the St John’s Wood School of Art in London, the first African to study art in England, and then worked at the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1922 he returned with a diploma in fine art and a teacher’s certificate and at once obtained a post as drawing master at King’s College, Lagos, and a few months later began teaching part-time in other schools as well, among them the CMS Grammar School. For a time he was the only art teacher in Nigeria. His lessons were built on perspective, the proportions of the human body, light and shade, and watercolour; hence the nickname Mr Perspective. In 1926 he asked the colonial Department of Education to send him an assistant, and in 1927 the Briton Kenneth Murray arrived. It was an odd alliance: Onabolu called for a break with traditional crafts and for the academic easel picture, while Murray defended traditional art against the onslaught of modernity and from 1933, from Ibadan, steered school teaching towards local crafts. In 1932 the art curriculum Onabolu had drawn up was approved.

He himself went on painting portraits: officials, doctors, lawyers, Lagos chiefs, with an emphatic dignity of pose. He worked in oil and pastel, less often in watercolour and gouache; the portrait of Dr Sapara is in watercolour. In the 1930s he designed pews for the new cathedral in Lagos, and in the 1940s he worked in pastel, painting studies and nudes. Several of his portraits are held in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Lagos, and his portrait of Princess Obasa was shown in 2025 at Tate Modern in London in an exhibition on Nigerian modernism.

In 1957 he received a British award for teaching art. In 1959 he joined the board of the Nigerian Council for the Advancement of Arts and Culture alongside Ben Enwonwu, in 1961 he was elected president of the Nigerian Academy of Arts, and in August 1962 he submitted to the council a memorandum on the teaching of art in schools and colleges. The Soviet art historian Nikolai Grigorovich considered him, in all likelihood, the first professional painter in Africa. Onabolu died in Lagos in 1963.