John J. Klejman, New York
Harold Kaye, Great Neck, New York, acquired from the above
Alphonse Jax, New York, acquired from the above
Edwin and Cherie Silver, Los Angeles, acquired from the above circa 1970

National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa, October 25, 1989 - September 3, 1990

Raoul Lehuard, Les phemba du mayombe, Arnouville, 1977, p. 121
Warren M. Robbins and Nancy Ingram Nooter, African Art in American Collections, Survey 1989, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 357, fig. 930
Herbert M. Cole, Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 90, no. 101

The sculptural subject of a mother and child - the first and most fundamental human relationship - is found in many cultures, and has a special universal transcendence. A particularly sensitive tradition of maternity sculpture emerged in the last millennium among the peoples of the Kongo kingdom in the western Congo. Wood sculptures known as phemba were created for use in association with women's cults. These exquisitely refined sculptures had great religious significance for their creators and original owners, and have been highly prized by Western collectors for their sublime humanistic power.

Koloss has noted that "a Yombe wooden mother-and-child figure in the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Tervuren is reported by its collector, Léo Bittremieux, to have been owned by a powerful male diviner for whom it represented the source of his own divinatory and generative powers. It was called phemba, a word that Bittremieux thought to be derived from kivemba, meaning to broadcast or eject, as in the seeds of potential children which accumulate in either a man or a woman. Thus, rather than representing a particular woman and child, or even a concept as specific as motherhood, the Yombe image of a nurturing woman may express the more general idea of fertility and creativity as it applies to all people, male as well as female" (Koloss, Art of Central Africa, 1990, p. 34).

Dumouchelle notes that the KiKongo term phemba means "white", and that it "suggests kaolin, a white chalk that is considered a symbol of fecundity and is often used in a diviner's, or nganga's, invocations. [...] Despite its outwardly intimate, nurturing pose, this piece demonstrates the regal passivity of many varieties of mother-and-child carvings; rather than representing a particular woman or even a human relationship, the pair is thought to function on a metaphorical plane, representing and celebrating womanhood as the archetypal (and, in this case, aristocratically ideal) source of creative power. As such, it certainly would have served to stimulate and strengthen the nganga's practice" (Dumouchelle, in Siegmann, ed., A Century At the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, p. 194).

Furthermore, Dumouchelle relays that "A missionary's field report from early in the twentieth century recounts encountering a nganga who claimed his phemba represented his 'mother' and carried the figure, maternally, in a cotton sling" (ibid., p. 194).

The Silver Kongo Maternity is of an expressive and freely com✱posed style, depicting the child as a full-bodied standing participant in the scene. The mother grasps her daughter by the arms, as if supporting and encouraging her as she sets out into the world. This is not the child as infant, seen in some Kongo depictions of nursing children, but rather a youth who has already received cosmetic scarification. Both figures have mirrored glass eyes, sacred windows onto another world; the surface bears thick encrustation of ritually applied pigments and materials from many years of devotional use. The head of the mother is surmounted by a worn cavity, and may have been used as a mortar in the preparation of magical substances for ritual practice.