A CLOSER LOOK
The post was one of four commissioned around 1910–14 by Onijagbo Obasoro Alowolodu, the ogoga, or king, of Ikere. It supported a palace veranda while presenting an image of divine rulership. At 152.5 centimetres high, the carved and pigmented wood worked as architecture at roughly human scale.
Olowe organized the sculpture around an emphatic reversal of size. The king sits below his much taller senior wife, whose position signals her status as guardian of his interests and a figure credited with political understanding and supernatural knowledge. During enthronement, she placed the spiritually charged crown on the king’s head.
Smaller figures at the king’s feet represent a junior wife and Eshu, the flute-playing trickster deity. Open spaces separate the bodies and keep their gestures legible from several angles. The changing proportions describe status and dependence rather than ordinary physical scale.
The post remained at the Ikere palace until at least 1964 and is documented there in photographs from 1937, 1958–59, and 1964. It later passed through dealers and a New York collection before the Art Institute purchased it in 1984. That ownership history is unusually detailed, yet the museum setting separates one surviving post from the veranda, neighboring carvings, ceremonies, and community for which it was made.
