new in our collection and announcements

an antique 18th Century wax seal stamp, with the coat of arms of

Augustines van der Crab (1715-1806)

sometimes documented as van der Krab,

a coat of arms showing three crabs with their claws pointed downwards

antieke, 18de eeuwse lakstempel / zegelstempel met het wapen van

van de / van der / vander Crab / Krab,

in zilver drie rode krabben met scharen omlaag

selling by delta 98 den haag - on eBay.com - item number: 40548922 5955

 

 

Na meer dan 30 jaar verzamelen, koesteren en zelfs liefhebben, is onze collectie penningen in andere handen overgegaan,

handen die deze penningen minstens zo waarderen als wij.

After over 30 years of collecting art medals, we sold our entire collection.

Some previous sold art medals:

 

 

a Wusear for an Aiyang, mostly refered to as Sacred Flute Stopper of the Mundugumor, a.k.a. Biwat People,

an indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, living along the Yuat River, a side-arm of the Lower Sepik River, in the East Sepik Province:

a carved figural, tribal wooden figure, we think it is an old and extremely rare type of Wusear,

we only found 2 similar ones on the internet

Here carved as an a antropomorph & zoomorph figure, with a long nose, held with it's two hands as if the snouth is a nose flute.

Wusear are regarded one of the most iconic genres of Melanesian art. Carved wooden wusear (stoppers) were placed in one end of the aiyang (flute), wusear were not a decorative element but effigies, male spirits, who "spoke" through the flute and thought by the Biwat themselves to be their most important and sacred objects. Wusear's were the crowns of the long bamboo flutes (aiyang) and their voices were heard when the flutes were blown, after the stoppers were removed. Their social, ceremonial, and religious significance was tremendous. They were considered to be 'the children of the mother crocodile spirit' (asin), a powerful being, that performed creative deeds in primeval times, and let the initiates be reborn by symbolically swallowing and throwing out the candidates.

While wusear are often called "flute stoppers" by Western scholars, this expression is misleading insofar as it reduces these effigies to a decorative function.

In fact, however, wusear were effigies who "spoke" through the flute. It is more appropriate to interpret the flute as part of the wusear than vice versa.

Here a man with an aiyang and it's wusear in the much more found style:

The flutes were not musical instruments, but rather 'megaphones', by means of which the leaders of the initiation ceremony could modulate and change their voices.

Through these, the flute figure, or 'wusear', 'spoke' to the initiates.

Thanks to the field research carried out by the American ethnologist Margaret Mead, anthropologists in the 1930s became aware of the existence of a people in Oceania and the type of sculpture they created. Mead labeled these people and their society Mundugumor (Mead, 1935). This name endured until the end of the twentieth century. Today, the people from this region are commonly known as Biwat.

Flute stoppers from this region were collected since the early twentieth century. Up until the early 1930s, the Mundugumor People still celebrated their last, grand initiation ceremonies, during which 'holy flutes' and 'flute stopping' figures, or 'flute stoppers', played an important role.

length (excl. square base): circa 39 cm / 15.3 inch

age: unknown - probably late 19th or early 20th Century,

provenance: unknown, except for an estate auction in The Netherlands.

Selling by delta 98 den haag on ebay.com - item number: 405532269194

This last picture is only informative to show a rather similar wusear we found on the internet,

sold in 2023 at Sotheby's Paris