Figure of a child with banana · period piece, around 1930

A small seated figure in painted earthenware or resin: a Black child with exaggerated features, an earring and a yellow banana in its arms.

This figure is a racist caricature. It belongs to a category of goods produced in enormous numbers across Europe and North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: money boxes, advertising figures, knick-knacks. The exaggerated lips, the infantilisation, the banana — none of that is accidental or clumsy modelling. It is the visual language with which the colonial powers depicted the people they ruled.

Because putting such objects away corrects nothing. This figure stood in European living rooms for decades, and anyone wanting to understand how self-evident these depictions once were has to be able to see one. It is offered here as a period document and described as such — not as «funny decor», and without the joke line the other articles in this shop carry.

Collectors of historical everyday culture, people working on colonial history, or anyone who wants the piece for a reason of their own. Anyone looking for a pretty little figurine is in the wrong place.

• Painted earthenware or resin
• Seated figure, roughly hand-sized
• No maker's mark visible, dating estimated

Good, paintwork largely intact, age-typical rubbing at the edges.