A half-length polychrome figurehead believed to represent King Solomon (c.990-931 BCE) possibly from the Norwegian wooden barque Ophir (1874). The bearded king is wearing a gold crown and purple tunic with a red cloak draped over his shoulders. He has a dark red belt with a gold buckle at his waist. In the ancient world, only kings could wear clothes dyed with expensive Tyrian purple. In the Bible, the enormously wealthy Solomon ruled over a kingdom stretching from the Euphrates to Egypt. The writer H. Rider Haggard popularised the discovery of this vast fortune in the adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885).

The figurehead is possibly from a 449-ton wooden barque built for H.H. Pettersen by Tellef Larsen at Arendal, Norway, in 1874. The ship was wrecked off Worthing, East Sussex on 6 December 1896.