Wednesday 6 August 2008

"Owned by a Duke in Northern Ireland"

I having been working on a study of South Italian pottery. One of the pieces under consideration passed through the Athena Fund II auction of 1990 and into a named New York gallery in 1992. I was going through my notes and found that the same gallery had supplied a first century BCE marble head of a Greek goddess to a North American collection in the same year.

The head had apparently once been
owned by a duke in Northern Ireland who, as a condition of sale, insisted that he "be not in any way approached or contacted" by anyone wanting to know more about the piece.
Before you ask, the piece had not been reported as stolen on the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) database.

No comments:

The Stern Collection in New York: Cycladic or Cycladicising?

Courtesy of Christos Tsirogiannis There appears to be excitement about the display of 161 Cycladicising objects at New York's Metropolit...