Ten paintings, prints and drawings of Cypriot antiquities from CVAR's collection of works by artists who visited the island. The earliest are two watercolours that Luigi Mayer painted at Amathus in 1792 for his patron Sir Robert Ainslie, British ambassador to the Porte, and which stayed unpublished: in one, labourers load stones from the ruined sea wall of Amathus onto a boat; the other, "Thermae with Piscinae", shows the ruins of the church of St Tychon. An octagonal watercolour of the end of the eighteenth century, unsigned, shows the ruins of Amathus by the shore. Mayer's engraving "A colossal vase near Limisso in Cyprus", published in 1803 in Views in the Ottoman Empire, shows the great stone vase at Amathus, and an etching by I. Clark after a drawing by William Turner, published in London by I. Murray in 1820, shows the village of Dali on the site of Idalion.
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Tristram Ellis came to Cyprus in 1878 to portray the new British possession and painted more than eighty watercolours of the island: two are here, the ruins of Soli with the hill of Vouni behind, and an excavation near Larnaca, probably at Kition, with the workmen, a seated overseer and a white tent. An engraving by A. L. Rawson from Harper's Weekly of 29 December 1877, "General Cesnola making explorations in Cyprus", sets a portrait of Luigi Palma di Cesnola above a scene at his excavations: Cesnola in white under an umbrella gives instructions to his overseer while workmen line up. Two pencil sketches from Leon Bakst's pocket sketchbook of 1921 record the Cypriot statues of korai that he later drew on for the costumes and hairstyles of his productions of Greek tragedies and ballets.
Sources
Centre of Visual Arts and Research (CVAR), Nicosia. Catalogue records PNT-00025 (Amathus, late eighteenth century), PNT-00350 and PNT-00351 (Mayer, 1792), PNT-00348 (Mayer, 1803), PNT-00595 (Turner), PNT-00200 and PNT-00216 (Ellis), PNT-00425 (Harper's Weekly) and PNT-00043 (Bakst). https://cvar.severis.org/en/explore/collections-archives/paintings/ (accessed 29 October 2026).
