 Welcome to another Barnes takeout. My name is Kailen Jewel. I am a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And I wanted to visit a room with you guys that I like to spend a lot of time in. This is room number 20 upstairs on the second floor of our galleries. And it's a room that can be a little bit overwhelming for people. There are a lot of smaller works of art on the walls. There are sculptures. There's furniture. There's all kinds of stuff here. And what Dr. Barnes has presented to us is this ensemble. Is he like to call them? It is organized. So if you feel a little overwhelmed by all of the works that you're seeing on this wall, don't worry. You can essentially take a line and put it all the way down through the middle of this ensemble. We can start up at the top with the metal object, the painting below it of the landscape, the saison drawing of a farmhand, that 18th or 19th century copy of a Venetian painting, and then so forth down through the sub-Saharan West African objects that are in the glass case below. And when we notice that central line, it gives a sense of balance to this ensemble. And I mentioned that because what I want to focus on for a couple of minutes is the throne on the left side of the screen. And the word throne might be an interesting word to use to describe that piece of furniture. But you can see that Dr. Barnes has paired the throne on one side with a chair, a ladder back chair on the other side, on the right side. So let's zoom in and look at this throne a little bit more closely. So here we can see it. And here's a better view. So this is a throne that was made by the Bamalake people who live in modern day western, the western grasslands of Cameroon. So we're talking about sub-Saharan West Africa. Dr. Barnes was a great collector, not just of European modern art, but he was also a great collector of African objects. And these are objects that he purposefully purchased because he felt that they were just as artistically important as European paintings. And so the collection at the Barnes Foundation is probably best known for its Matisse's, its Picasso's, Renoir's, the Cezanne's, all of those really fabulous modern artists. But it's also very well known for this important collection of West African sculptures. And so each one of these objects tells a story. The story that is tied to this throne is that it was made for a king. And these kings, again, were part of the Bamalake peoples, the Bamalake culture in western Cameroon. This object is carved out of a single piece of wood. So if we look at it from the bottom up to the top, you can see the wood grain is running vertically through the object. And what we can tell from this, and you can really see it from the top part of this chair, is that it's carved from a single piece of wood. The tree is called the Capek Tree, which is a tree that is found in all kinds of, here we can see a detail of the great little leopard at the bottom. But this is a tree that grows in rainforests, tropical rainforests across the world, including in Sub-Saharan West Africa. And so we know that this was not just carved from a single piece of wood, but carved from the entire tree trunk, which again you can see from the circular shape of this chair back, the chair seat, and the base that is supporting all of this. So when we look at the base, we also notice that there is this really great leather cushion. And the cushion was originally attached, and it's kind of hard to tell, but it was originally attached to the seat with raffia, and raffia is made from a certain kind of palm frond, the raffia palm tree. So this is an object that was really the most important piece of furniture in a Bama Lake village. This could have only been sat in by a king. The leopard at the base of it is a symbol of power. If we zoom in on the little spots, and he's got this great smile, and these little spots that we see here were created using some kind of metal rod that was heated up to create these kind of burn marks that we see, these circular burn marks. We can see the tool marking also on the base of this object. And when the king, the Bama Lake king would sit in these types of thrones, the throne itself would start to take on the power of the king, the throne itself would become what we would call a power object. And it would be something that could only be touched or handled by or moved by its very specific elite members of these societies. And one last thing I'd like to mention about it is that our version of the barns has this really elaborate curved back, which is kind of unusual for other Bama Lake thrones that we see in other museum collections or in archival photographs from the early 20th century. Hours is different primarily because it was probably made for the art market. And we know that in the late 19th into the early 20th century, we have the art market starting to become very interested in these types of objects. So we don't necessarily know if this throne was ever sat in by a Bama Lake king, if it was made for a Bama Lake king, or if it was made for the European art market. There is no indication in our archives of any of these things. And so our best guess is that we are looking at an object that is meant to symbolize power. It is meant to be the most important part of a Bama Lake architectural ensemble. And it's one that is meant to evoke the power of the ruler. So if we return back to the room, room number 20 at the barns, we can see again how Dr. Barnes has placed it in a symmetrical arrangement on the other side of the room with that American ladder back chair that was made sometime in the late 19th, or the late 18th early 19th century somewhere in Pennsylvania. And Dr. Barnes is saying that they are visually similar to each other, that they are both chairs, they are both made for specific purposes, and they share similar kinds of materials, similar kinds of shapes. And that is what Barnes was doing with this collection. He's wanting us to look at these objects and find the connections between them based on what it is that we see. So next time you guys come to the barns, keep an eye out for room 20 and start to find these visual connections between things as disparate as a Pennsylvania chair and a Sub-Saharan West African kingly throne. Thank you for joining me today. Stay tuned for another Barnes Takeout. Take care. 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