Recalling Queen Elizabeth, through the eyes of the African master Ben Enwonwu

The artist

Celebrated as one of Africa’s most influential artists of the 20th century, Enwonwu was born in 1917 into the noble family of Umueze-Aroli in Onitsha, Nigeria. Exposed to art at a young age by his father, who taught him the art of Igbo traditional sculpting, in 1933 he started formal art education at Government College, Ibadan, followed by Government College, Umuahia. He was a student of British artist Kenneth Crossworth Murray. Following his first solo in Lagos in 1944, he won a scholarship to study art at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, becoming the first African to graduate from the school in 1947.

The royal commission

According to the Ben Enwonwu Foundation website, the artist conceived the idea for the commission and proposed it to Alan Lennox-Boyd, secretary of State for the Colonies of the United Kingdom, to commemorate the Queen’s visit to Nigeria in 1956. It was arranged in consultation with Buckingham Palace.

The announcement was made in the media at the time. The foundation website quotes The Times (London) stating, “Her Majesty the Queen has agreed to sit for a portrait in bronze to be executed by the Nigerian sculptor Mr Enwonwu in commemoration of the Queen’s visit to Nigeria in January and February of 1956.”

The sittings for the portrait only began in 1957. The total number was 12, with the initial sittings taking place at Buckingham Palace, and the rest at a private studio of Sir William Reid-Dick, Enwonwu’s colleague at the Royal Society of British Artists. The Nigerian artist initially prepared preliminary sketches and models in clay as well as watercolours of the queen’s profile.

The portrait, its reception

Now at the National Museum in Lago, Enwonwu first exhibited the bronze statue of the Queen at the 1957 annual exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists in London. The next year, the life-sized statue with the Queen seated with her hands in her lap was unveiled at the Nigerian House of Representatives in Lagos.

The sculpture was generally well received, although some pointed to the fuller lips of the Queen in the sculpture, one of Enwonwu’s traits to “Africanise” his subjects. The Times noted that it conveyed “the requisite sense of regal dignity which will probably not be fully effective until it is seen from a distance in the sort of public setting for which it was commissioned.

“In the comparative intimacy of a gallery however the boldly semi abstract treatment of the lower folds of the dress not only directs attention upwards, as designed, to the more conventional realism of the head but it underlines in this and other important, detailed passages of the figure a general feeling of constraint and lack of vitality.”

Enwonwu’s works

The artist began his career as a sculptor in a group exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery in London in 1937. A supporter of the anti-colonial Negritude movement founded by African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s, through his art, Enwonwu attempted to highlight African culture. Several of his paintings featured elongated forms, dense female silhouettes and moving figures that captured the essence of dance.

In 1968, he said, “The African philosophy of Negritude has defined the kind of knowledge that characterised the African spirit and mind.”

In his five-decade-long career, he also painted Nigerian landscapes and in the 1970s, he became the first professor of fine art at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. His portrait of Nigerian royal princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, termed “African Mona Lisa”, sold for over $1.6 million at a London auction in 2018.