As a result, the artists often depicted African men with white hands, eye sockets, ears or even entire faces. They also painted them in one flat colour (often blue when depicting Africans), which was often so concentrated that the facial features became indistinguishable. With few exceptions, the Precursors painted figures in profile. Djilatendo had a specific way of depicting humans—small faces and large bulbous foreheads, which is a form typical of Bakuba masks.

​

Early twentieth-century Europeans recognised their artistic interactions only with the Northern margins of Africa, conveniently ignoring the cultural and artistic exchanges between African kingdoms such as the Kongo and their European counterparts. By the early twentieth century, European museums confined the art of this vast mainly tropical region to the realm of ethnography, and when exceptional pieces of African art, such as the sixteenth-century brass head of the Queen Mother of Edo, were encountered by Europeans, they were often hailed as being imports from a lost tribe of Israelites or ancient Egypt, as fakes, or as the work of some mythical people. [3] In a major detour from the norm, Georges Thiry and Gaston-Denys Périer considered the Precursors’ watercolours as African art instead of ethnographic work. [4]