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Unidentified photographer
Major General Horatio Gordon Robley with his collection of tattooed Maori heads
1895
Photograph
Wellcome Collection
L0032965 - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK: England & Wales, see http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/page/Prices.html
LL/51342
K. Arnold and D. Olsen, 2003, Medicine man: the forgotten museum of Henry Wellcome, London 2003, pp. 240-241
E. G. Allingham, 1924, A romance of the rostrum, being the business life of Henry Stevens together with some account of famous sales, pp. 204-205
Curatorial summary - Wellcome Library:
"The most gruesome offerings [auctoned by Henry Stevens] were shrunken human heads, sold by Stevens on several occasions, the most remarkable being, in 1902, the collection of thirty-three tattooed Maori heads, the property of General Robley, who, it is said, decorated his bedroom wall with these relics and 'when unable to sleep at night would rise and comb his Maoris' hair, and felt himself soothed' (Allingham ,204-5). " (Michael P. Cooper, 'Stevens family (per. c.1830-1925)', Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford 2004). The accuracy of Allingham's account is questionable
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