Thomas Bayet, through unparalleled access to the Ivan Dierickx and Pierre Loos Archives, has prepared the volume’s extensive historic overviews on the various workshops and their founders. His profound knowledge of Congolese art, and extensive background on the painters, forms the backbone of an account that values the artworks’ historical development and critical discussion. The European protectionist attitude of Thiry, Desfossés, Moonens and Lods is more complex than first appears. Despite their ‘good intentions’ and emphasis on ‘preserving the indigenous traditions’, and ‘promoting the innate artistic creativity’ of the Congolese, the academic framework, techniques and media that Europeans imposed unavoidably affected the Congolese creations that they hoped to foster. Tensions between the Europeans’ mission and Congolese realities are encoded into the pictorial representations. These tensions remain largely invisible to European audiences, as to see them one must be aware of their original contexts and critical of their Eurocentric frames of reference. From this perspective, the ability to see through the paintings creates privileged entry points into the realities that they are meant to represent.