Ben Enwonwu

Biography

During her visit to Nigeria in 1956, Queen Elizabeth II commissioned a sculpted portrait of herself from Ben Enwonwu and sat for him. He showed the finished bronze in London the following year, at the exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists. The story looks almost like an anecdote from the colonial era, but the art historian Sylvester Ogbechie, author of a monograph on Enwonwu, sees something serious in it: an African modernist working with the European genre of the official portrait on his own terms and with his own ideas of what an artist is.

He was born in Onitsha, in the south-east of present-day Nigeria, then a British possession. The day is known, 14 July, but the year is given differently: some sources say 1917, others 1921. The earlier date seems more plausible to me, and here is why. Enwonwu was born one of twins into a noble Igbo family. His father, Omenka Odigwe Emeka Enwonwu, worked as a technician for the Royal Niger Company, sat on the council of chiefs of Onitsha and was a well-known carver: he made staffs of office, stools, carved doors and cult images. His mother was a successful cloth trader. His father died in 1921, and the son inherited his tools and carried on carving in the Igbo tradition his father had begun to teach him. For a newborn such an apprenticeship is impossible; for a four-year-old it is at least conceivable.

He went through several primary schools, in Onitsha, Umuahia and Port Harcourt. Then came the government colleges in Ibadan and Umuahia; he finished at the latter in 1937. At both, drawing was taught by Kenneth Murray, the colonial official responsible for art education and later director of the Department of Antiquities. Enwonwu became his assistant and was considered one of the most gifted members of the “Murray group”. In 1937 Murray exhibited his work in London, at the Zwemmer Gallery.

After that their relationship soured. According to Ogbechie, Murray disliked the fact that the college in Umuahia had given his former pupil the same salary as experienced teachers. Murray left, and Enwonwu took his place as art master. He then taught at a mission school in Calabar Province (1940–1941) and at Edo College in Benin City (1941–1943).

In 1944, on a scholarship from Shell and the British Council, he went to England. For the duration of the war the Slade School of Fine Art had moved to Oxford, to the Ruskin School at the Ashmolean Museum, and there he studied and graduated with distinction, then studied anthropology at the University of London with a focus on the ethnography of West Africa. The dates of the separate stages of his studies are not precisely known; they were complete by 1948. Nkiru Nzegwu believes it was the racism he met in England that pushed him towards anthropology. From 1948 he was art adviser to the Nigerian government.

The 1950s went on exhibitions and commissions. Between 1949 and 1954 he was shown in London, Lagos, Milan, New York, Washington and Boston, and he made lecture tours of the United States. In 1951 he became official illustrator to the Lagos branch of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society; his portrait of its head, Chief Candido João da Rocha, dates from the same time. The main sculpture of these years, “Anyanwu” (“Eye of the Sun”, 1954–1955), was commissioned for the National Museum in Lagos and still stands on its facade; a full-size version is in the United Nations collection in New York, and there are also smaller replicas. In 1958 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire and illustrated Amos Tutuola’s novel “The Brave African Huntress”. He also kept a studio in London and was a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

In 1961 Enwonwu carved seven wooden sculptures for the London headquarters of the Daily Mirror. In 2013 they were found in the garage of a school in Bethnal Green. In 1966–1968 he was on the staff of the University of Lagos, in 1968–1971 he was the government’s adviser on culture, and in 1969 he received an honorary doctorate from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. In 1971 he was visiting artist at the Institute of African Studies at Howard University in Washington, and from that year until 1975 he was the first professor of fine arts at the University of Ife in Ile-Ife. From these years comes “Tutu” (1973), three portraits of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi. After 1975 all three vanished from sight; one turned up in 2017 in a London flat. In Nigeria this portrait became a national icon and a sign of reconciliation after the civil war. In 1977 Enwonwu was a consultant to the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, and in 1980 he received the Nigerian National Order of Merit. A year later President Shehu Shagari, on a state visit to Britain, presented Elizabeth II and Prince Philip with a reduced version of “Anyanwu”.

Not everything has survived. The sculpture “The Risen Christ” (1986), installed at the University of Ibadan, was burned during political and religious unrest.

Enwonwu died on 5 February 1994 in Ikoyi, a district of Lagos. A crater on Mercury is named after him.