This mask shares with the Fang reliquary head (240) the honour of being a founder-member of the African part of the Sainsbury collection. Both formerly belonged to Paul Guillaume, who for over twenty years had been in the first rank of French connoisseur-dealers in African art. Still among the most prized and beautiful carvings in the collection, they bear witness to Paul Guillaume’s discernment. Many Guro masks are demonstrably and, on the part of their sculptors, consciously made to be ‘beautiful’, and perhaps conform to a universal ideal of beauty — a view shared by André Malraux, who included this mask in his Musée Imaginaire