Foreword Henrietta Lidchi
The promise of sustained and synthesized provenance research is that it can start to identify the questions that urgently need to be answered in order to understand better the nature and history of museum collections. If the focus of the first volume of this series was that of individual items in the collection, the emphasis of this publication is a collection – a product of a merger – that can be conceived as one collection because of its link to time and place, broadly described as the Benin collection. The question that drives this publication, and its primary focus, is understanding how the collection of artworks attributed variously to Benin in the collection of the National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW), the Netherlands, were acquired. In questioning the manner in which these artworks came into the collection, the task of this report is to assess the likelihood of the link between the items in the care of NMVW and the attack in 1897 by British-led forces on Benin City (Nigeria), Kingdom of Benin in current day Edo State, Nigeria. As noted in the foreword to the previous volume, Provenance, under series editor Wonu Veys, is a means of making our research available and accountable. There is 7
