[3][4] Both feature a serene face of the Queen Mother wearing a beaded headdress, a beaded choker at her neck, scarification highlighted by iron inlay on the forehead, all framed by the flange of an openwork tiara and collar of symbolic beings, as well as double loops at each side for attachment of the pendant.

[12] Benin specialist and anthropologist Paula Ben-Amos, however, wrote that the masks were worn on the waist as pendants during the Ugie Iyoba and Emobo ceremonies.

[12] The masks' expression of "impersonal coolness" reflected the stylistic conventions of the Oba's ivory carvers guild, with a naturalism typical of craft in early Benin art.

[19] The depiction of women is rare in Benin art,[4] though the position of Idia, known to Edo tradition as "the only woman who went to war", is exceptional, and the very title of Iyoba or Queen Mother was created for her.

[29] The headdress forms part of the ukpe-okhue ("parrot's beak") hairstyle she originated, and is more clearly seen on the Bronze Head of Queen Idia.

[30] The depicted precious coral of the headdress and choker are in the form of cylindrical ileke ("royal") beads, which it was the specially-granted privilege of the Queen Mother to wear, being usually reserved for the Oba and the Edogun (war chief).

The foreheads of both masks were are inscribed with four vertical cicatrices over each eye, with inlays of a pair of iron strips highlighting the scarification.

[37][38][39] The openwork of the tiara and collar represent tiny heads of Portuguese men in the tiara of both the Met and the British Museum examples, with eleven figures in the British Museum mask, and in the Met mask seven figures of Portuguese men alternating with six representations of mudfish, the West African lungfish.

[15] Benin art historian Barbara Blackmun interprets these crown adornments as a reference to Idia's ability to conduct the Portuguese power to her son's favor.

[12][19] During the 1897 punitive Benin Expedition, the British looted a group of similar ivory masks in the Oba's palace bedroom.

Two additional masks from the bedchamber group were taken by the British and now reside in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum (formerly Principal Medical Officer Robert Allman) and the Linden Museum in Stuttgart (formerly W. D. Webster[41] and then Augustus Pitt Rivers),[20] and there is one in a private collection of the heirs of Henry Galway.

[9] Five to six masks of this type[42] were found in a large chest in 1897 in the bedchamber of the then-reigning Oba Ovonramwen, the ruler at the Benin court.

They were taken at a time of great civil unrest during the British punitive Benin Expedition of 1897, the British burned the royal palaces of the Oba and the Queen Mother and looted thousands of ivory, brass and wood artworks from the ancestral altars, private quarters and storerooms and many were sold in England to western museums and collectors to offset the cost of the expedition.

The mask, he predicted, would redefine the collection and go on permanent display, on par with the Museum of Modern Art's well-known Sleeping Gypsy (1897) by Henri Rousseau.

[48][49] The Nigerian government was unsuccessful in securing a loan of the work from the British Museum, and commissioned Edo artist Erhabor Emokpae to recreate the mask as a 20-foot tall bronze centerpiece for the festival (on display at the National Arts Theatre since 1979).

[52] Another Edo artist, Felix Idubor, was commissioned to carve two replica masks in ivory for the Nigerian National Museum.

[46] African art historian Ezio Bassani wrote that the profile of the Met's mask was "at once delicate and strong" with a "musical rhythm", and that its use of iron and copper inlay was both "discreet and functional".

[19] He wrote that the Metropolitan and British Museum masks were among the most beautiful ivories carved in Benin, and that their artist was both refined and sensitive.