A Text-Book Textile at the Pitt Rivers Museum: Historiographical Notes on a Kongo Cushion-Cover, its Canonical Status, Dating, and Provenance

Since the mid 1990s, the Kongo cushion-cover has been exhibited and published a number of times--and, as he writes, other loans and publications (including this one) are in train. As a result, it is now a well-known, indeed canonical work of not only Kongo, but also African, Atlantic, and World art. Having been responsible for its curation at the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum for the past twenty years, and thus being at least partly responsible for its recent busy career and canonization, he has long felt under an obligation to publish a detailed account of it and its history. Here, Coote details the Kongo art history.