A
native of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Richmond Barthé left the south to study
at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924. He moved to New York in 1929, where he
quickly became one of the foremost artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

Feral Benga portrays
François (a.k.a. Feral) Benga, a Senegalese cabaret dancer who Barthé saw
perform in Paris in 1934. He began modeling the sculpture immediately after his
return to New York, rendering the figure with an Art Deco sinuousness that
captures the dancer’s grace and deliberate exoticism. The art historian James A. Porter wrote
admiringly of Barthé in 1943: “[His works] are so close to perfection of
statement that their effect on the spectator is transporting. Never
elsewhere has the sculptor better suited means to mood or pose to action.”