Dance of Love
I had researched this family heirloom a few months back, with a Google image search telling me she was an “African wood female bust made for Western export” circa 1900. I blithely wrote up a story about her, crediting her to my paternal great grandfather, Watts S. Humphrey (1844-1910,) a man in the style of Teddy Roosevelt. He was a well to do attorney living in Michigan with the means to travel. There are papers and photographs in my family files of him camping, hunting and fishing, both in the western US as well as Canada. I ended my charming write-up with a pithy note about a possible safari in Africa, and put the writing aside.
You know the adage “don’t always believe what you read”? Doubly so for information gleaned off the internet. As Abraham Lincoln said: “the problem with quotes found on the internet is they are often not true”. It goes without saying that image searches are also flawed, and while I use them frequently when looking at art, it takes some detective work to drill down to what is true and what is not. To quote a gentleman in a Quora thread:
“Internet is one of the biggest sources of knowledge and information in human civilization.
There are people who want you to think in a certain way. There are also people who want you to act in a certain way. Some of them are not so nice people.
The only objective of such people is to create fake news and mislead people. Some of these people want you to hate other religion, caste, gender or nation.
At any given point of time, there are millions of active propagandists in the world. And most of them are making a good use of internet…
In short, be aware about the intention and it will help us to spot the fake news or propaganda. Once we spot it, we can make a balanced decision.” (1)
Having opened my “African Wood Female Bust” write-up this morning, I entered the photograph into the Google Image search function again, and it seems in the 6 months since my prior writing, Google’s aptitude for identifying her improved. She is not African but Balinese. So much for my prior story. Drat, back to doing research.
According to my research, she is a bust of a Balinese dancer, made in Java c. 1930, and carved of boxwood. Honestly, there are conflicting ideas as to what style of dance the woman depicts. Bali has a number of traditional dances, with elaborate costumes, but the one most closely resembling the headgear this statue wears is the “Janger” dance, done by 12 young men and 12 young women. The dance originated sometime in the 1920s, and the name is translated as “infatuation” – a highly choreographed dance of young people meeting and falling in love. (2)
As I mulled various options, it was clear to me the statue came from someone in our ancestry who had reason to be in the Pacific sometime after the 1930s
This photo, of my pregnant mother, shows the statue on the shelf behind Mom (Barbara Fallon Humphrey 1928-2021). These shelves, with the pipes and model boat, look familiar, so I suspect this is in Chappaqua, NY where I was born. If so, the pregnancy could be one of my brothers or even me (1959-1966). And yes, my mother was always petite, even after bearing 7 children. The mystery remains as to how the Balinese carving came to be in my father’s possession.
I have ruled out my father’s grandfathers as the origin of the piece. His maternal grandfather, Ben Strong (1872-1926) and paternal grandfather, Watts Humphrey (1844-1918) who I originally credited with the “African bust” were deceased before the piece was made. I did recall a family tale about my father’s mother’s older brother Philip being in the military and thus I hunted him down. According to a New York Time’s obituary, “Uncle Phil” Strong was actually known as Brig. General Philip Strong (1900-1971), a Marine Corp General who specialized in U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. “He was an intelligence specialist for the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. For two years during World War II, General Strong was chief intelligence officer for the commander of battleships in the Pacific.” He was in the military from 1926 until his retirement in 1964. (3) Bingo!
I am guessing here, but I suspect “Uncle” Brig. General Philip gifted the statue to my parents, possibly as a wedding gift in 1955. Fitting, I think, for a newly married couple destined to have 7 children, to have a statue honoring a dance of infatuation and love.
(1) Anal Kumar Raj
(2) https://www.discovabali.com/balis-most-popular-traditional-dance/
(3) https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/25/archives/gen-philip-strong-expert-on-u2-dies.html