Benin Bronzes

The Benin Bronzes are several thousand brass and bronze plaques, portrait heads, figures and regalia created by artists of the Edo people for the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, from at least the fourteenth century onward, reaching particular artistic heights during the reigns of the Obas Esigie, around 1550, and Eresoyen, in the mid-eighteenth century. The great majority were seized by British forces during the punitive Benin Expedition of 1897, which burned and looted Benin City in retaliation for the killing of a British trade delegation, after which the objects were auctioned off in London to defray the cost of the expedition and dispersed into museum and private collections across Europe and North America; the British Museum alone holds roughly nine hundred pieces, while fewer than fifty remained in Nigeria by the late twentieth century. The bronzes are now at the centre of an active international restitution debate, and a number of institutions, including museums in Germany, returned pieces to Nigeria beginning in 2022.