Among the most elaborately adorned Baatombu (singular, Baatonu) vessels are large egg-shaped jars with heavily embellished surfaces that combine delicate incising with bold modeling in low or high relief. Some of these, as well as similarly shaped shea-butter-fueled lamps, are decorated with inventive sculptural forms including animals and fully realized figures.
This jar may have been commissioned as a “butter jar” for a newly married woman. Central to its imagery is a male and female couple—tendered in an elongated style—that stands rooted in the swirling sea of imagery enveloping the pot from top to bottom. The heads of a man, wearing a chief’s hat, and woman, wearing a traditional headwrap, float amid the images of a large chameleon, a crocodile, and hemispherical beads, some linked together, possibly referring to the sexually provocative beads that Baatombu women wear around their waists. [See also 2002.625, 2005.240, and 2005.272].