165. KORWAR ANCESTOR FIGURE, CENDERAWASIH BAY, INDONESIA wood Height 28.5 cm Provenance Henry Blekkink (1888-1953), The Hague Literature Weener, F., 'The Korwar Collection of Henry Blekkink', in Tribal Art Magazine, no.63, Spring 2012, p.92 Corbey, R., Korwar: Northwest New Guinea ritual art according to missionary sources, Leiden, 2019, pp.68, 77, 111 fig.79 Henry Blekkink (1888, Java – 1953, The Hague) was a Dutch geography teacher with early connections to the Dutch East Indies. According to Weener (op. cit.), Blekkink is believed to have acquired his korwar' collection through Frans Johannes Frederik van Hasselt (1870–1939), a protestant missionary of the Utrecht Missionary Society. Missionaries from this society were active in northern New Guinea from 1862. Van Hasselt, who arrived in the Cenderawasih Bay region in 1894, gathered a substantial number of these ancestral figures and sent them to the Netherlands, where many were displayed in exhibitions organized by the Utrecht Missionary Society from 1909. The author suggests that Blekkink likely met van Hasselt through the New Guinea study circle of the Moluccan Institute, where both were active participants in the 1930s.