A fine Dan mask

of delicate proportions, pierced around the rim and a transverse furrow at the crown for attachment, the pointed chin and downturned mouth with full lips and inset pointed, metal teeth, the small nose with frown lines emanating around the mouth, the slit eyes bisected by a medial ridge; '25' in pigment at reverse; dark brown surface with taught quality and grain exposed from age.

Collected by Dr. George Harley, Liberia
Paul Rabut, Westport, Connecticut, 1950s
Merton D. Simpson, New York, January 1963

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Public Museum, Selections from the William W. Brill Collection of African Art, May 5 – August 31, 1969 (for additional venues see bibliography, Milwaukee 1969)

Milwaukee 1969: 11, figure 10

One of his earliest acquisitions, Brill noted about this mask enthusiastically 'My best Dan!!' (personal notes of William W. Brill, doc. 244). The mask was collected by Dr. George Harley (1894-1966) who was a medical missionary in Ganta, Liberia from 1926-1962. During this time he acquired over 1,000 masks from the region. A few hundred, particularly those collected before 1946, went to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; others went to private collectors. Harley was not a professional art historian or anthropologist, but he received a great deal of education through courses he took at Harvard while on furlough and his applied knowledge, once back in Liberia. In 1941, he wrote Notes on the Poro in Liberia and in 1950 he wrote Masks as Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia. While much of the information he provided has been disputed by later scholarship, his information nevertheless provided a foundation for our knowledge of Dan masks and their function within the secret societies. Harley was working and interviewing informants during a time when there was still a relatively strong memory of Poro society practices before they began to change under Western influence. See Wells (1977: 22-27) for further discussion. Comparison with a series of photographs of masks collected by Dr. Harley (now in a private collection themselves) suggests that the present example is number 9 from the 1954 Series (Cf. Wells 1977: 27).