Collection·Wellcome Collection, London

The Lawrence-Cesnola album, 1881

78 items: 59 object photographs, 1 map, 18 documents.

Held by Wellcome Collection, London. Rights, sources and how to cite

This album is a copy of Cyprus Antiquities, the photographic catalogue of the Lawrence-Cesnola collection, printed and bound by W. Holmes & Son of 195 Oxford Street, London, in 1881. Its title page describes the contents as "Cyprus antiquities excavated by Major Alexander Palma di Cesnola ... 1876 to 1879". Alessandro (Alexander) Palma di Cesnola, the younger brother of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, dug in Cyprus with money from the London financier Edwin Henry Lawrence until private excavation was stopped after the British arrived in the summer of 1878. Most of the finds were shipped to London and shown in Lawrence's house in Holland Park, and Cesnola married Lawrence's daughter in 1879.

The album was made to present the collection to scholars. Sixty mounted photographs on the rectos (fols 1r–60r) show the objects laid out in groups on boards and shelves: gold jewellery, glass, pottery of many shapes, terracotta figurines, lamps, metalwork, coins, stone heads and inscribed stones, with a photograph of an early printed map of Cyprus first. The versos carry printed text: an account of the island and its history, a survey of Cypriot antiquities, a review of the collection reprinted from The Athenaeum of 26 June 1880, copies and readings of inscriptions by A. H. Sayce, and letters of thanks and comment from Ernest Renan, Samuel Birch, Sayce, J. R. Herbert, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, W. E. Gladstone and Charles Dilke. Olivier Masson identified the photographer as Henri Claudet, whose name appears on the first printing of 1880; in the 1881 printing some photographs were reversed in printing. For many objects whose present whereabouts are unknown the album remains the best record of how they looked in 1880.

The collection could not be sold as a whole and was dispersed at Sotheby's in London in a first sale in June 1883 (sale catalogue) and further sales in 1884, 1888 and 1892, after Lawrence's death in 1891. Before the second sale the British Museum bought a group of inscribed stones from Lawrence directly, in April 1884. The Wellcome Collection's copy (922i) was digitised in full; here each photograph is an item with our English title and a description of what it shows, and the printed text is grouped into its sections, each with its pages. Wellcome publishes the album under the Public Domain Mark. The album is also listed in the document register.

Sources

Cesnola, A. P. di. 1881. Lawrence-Cesnola Collection. Cyprus Antiquities Excavated by Major Alexander Palma di Cesnola, 1876 to 1879. London: W. Holmes & Son.
Masson, O. 1996. "La dispersion des antiquités chypriotes: les deux collections Cesnola." Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 25 (doi:10.3406/cchyp.1996.1298), part II.
Reeve, A. H. 2021. Ancient Cyprus in Leeds: Objects, Networks and Museums from 1870 to 1947. PhD thesis, University of Leeds, p. 79.
Wellcome Collection, London. Catalogue record of Antiquities from Cyprus, photograph album, 1881 (922i), citing E. Goring, A Mischievous Pastime: Digging in Cyprus in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 15.