A Bird in the Hand: The 2,700-Year Journey of a Cypriot Jug

Prologue: A Silent Witness

It rests today in the Netherlands, a silent terracotta vessel. A stylized bird, captured mid-stride in umber slip, adorns its body. For over two and a half millennia, this jug has been a witness. It has seen the rise and fall of empires, the chaos of war, the quiet of the tomb, the thrill of discovery, the greed of men, and the patient dedication of scholars. Its journey is a detective story, a messy, tangled thread of provenance passed from the hands of an ancient Cypriot artisan to a Union Army colonel, an English general, a fascist sympathizer, a suspected German spy, and a series of academics and dealers. It is a story linked together by textual descriptions and, most crucially, two photographs: snapshots in time from 1881 and 1883 that provided the keys to unlocking its remarkable history.

Part 1: The Artisan's Hand (circa 700 BCE)

Our story begins on the island of Cyprus during the Cypro-Archaic period (c. 750-475 BCE). This was an age when Cyprus was a crucible of cultures, a strategic crossroads where the growing influence of the Greek world met the ancient traditions of the Near East. Powerful city-kingdoms like Salamis, Kition, and Paphos flourished, competing for dominance and acting as critical hubs of trade and innovation. Cypriot copper was a prized commodity, traded across the Mediterranean, and with it came ideas, technologies, and artistic styles.

Into this dynamic world, our artisan was born. Following a period of upheaval, the Iron Age introduced the potter's wheel to the island, leading to more standardized and functional vessel shapes. Potters of the time became masters of intricate geometric decoration, covering surfaces with complex, repeating bands of patterns. While beautiful in their own right, these designs could feel impersonal, a rigid system that somewhat curtailed the full expression of an artist's individual creativity.

But a new artistic impulse began to emerge, one that sought freedom and dynamism: the Free-Field style. This was a conscious break from tradition. With this technique, the artist treated the surface of the vessel not as a space to be filled, but as an open canvas. The uniformity of repeating bands gave way to the drama of isolation. A single, expressive motif would be placed with deliberate care, commanding the viewer's focus and creating a palpable connection to the creator who lived over two and a half millennia ago. On this particular jug, the chosen motif was a bird.

Such imagery was far from incidental in Cypriot culture. Birds were potent symbols, appearing frequently in both sculpture and painted ceramics. While many depictions were stylized, ancient artisans clearly distinguished between different types. There were fearsome birds of prey, symbols of power often found in sanctuaries. There were graceful waterfowl, whose migratory nature linked them to the afterlife, making them common in tombs. And then there were songbirds.

Songbirds, including doves and pigeons, were the most common type of bird found as votive offerings in sanctuaries. Hundreds of terracotta figurines depict worshippers, overwhelmingly female, cradling a songbird as a gift to a deity, perhaps Aphrodite, whose cult was central to the island. The bird on our jug, with its balanced proportions and confident terrestrial stance, falls squarely into this category. It was likely seen as a pure offering, a symbol of life and perhaps rebirth, or a companion for the deceased on their journey to the underworld. Its decoration gives it religious and funerary significance, elevating it from a utilitarian object to one with a sacred nature. Placed within a tomb, sealed in the Cypriot earth, it began its long, silent vigil, an artifact of an ancient ritual waiting for history to find it once more.

Part 2: The Treasure Hunter's Spade (1865-1879)

For over two thousand years, it lay undisturbed. Empires rose and fell above it, Persian, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, but the jug remained in its quiet and dark chamber. Then, in the mid-19th century, it was brought blinking into the harsh Cypriot sun by the rough hands of excavators. They worked for a man whose life was as dramatic and controversial as any epic: Luigi Palma di Cesnola.

An Italian aristocrat by birth, Luigi di Cesnola was a veteran of the American Civil War, a conflict that had already claimed over half a million lives. His military career was a turbulent saga of ambition and scandal. He was accused of theft and, in an extraordinary episode, was dishonorably dismissed by President Lincoln himself, only to be reinstated a month later. This reinstatement led him to the bloody Battle of Aldie in 1863. Stripped of his sword after protesting a promotion, he watched his cavalry regiment falter. In a moment of high drama, his commanding general released him from arrest, handed him his own weapon, and commanded, "Take it and bring it back to me covered in the enemy's blood." Cesnola led a decisive charge, turning defeat into victory, but was found wounded under his horse and captured. He spent nearly a year in the infamous Libby Prison before being released in a prisoner exchange. By 1865, just days before Lincoln's assassination, he was appointed American Consul to Cyprus.

His arrival on the island was hardly auspicious. The steamer anchored over a kilometer from shore in rough waters. Cesnola, initially shocked by what he perceived as a desolate landscape, was hesitant to leave the ship. He was finally convinced, only for his small boat to get stuck in the sand. Without alternative, he was carried ashore on the shoulders of a local boatman. This was how the great treasure hunter of Cyprus first touched its soil.

Cesnola quickly developed a passion for its antiquities. But his was not the careful, methodical archaeology of today. It was a treasure hunt, a race for material driven by ego and profit. He hired vast teams of local diggers with one goal: find objects. His methods were crude and rapacious. He boasted of opening over 10,000 tombs in the area of Dali alone, frequently lamenting in his writings when his "unprofessional men" would shatter statues and pots with their pickaxes in their haste.

In 1873, he was joined by his younger brother, Alessandro, who became a partner in this chaotic enterprise. Securing funding from a wealthy British financier and his future father-in-law, Edwin Lawrence, Alessandro began his own excavations. While Luigi focused on grand statues and major sites, Alessandro developed a reputation for finding high-quality pottery. It was likely in a tomb near Ormidia, a site the brothers themselves claimed yielded the most beautifully decorated archaic pottery on the island, that his diggers, sometime between 1876 and 1879, unearthed a particular jug decorated with a single, elegant bird. To them, it was just one of thousands of finds, another piece for the ever-growing "Lawrence-Cesnola Collection" destined not for a museum, but for the auction block.

Part 3: From Cyprus to the London Auction Block (1880-1883)

The Cesnola brothers had amassed a staggering collection, tens of thousands of artefacts torn from the Cypriot soil with little to no scientific documentation. Their goal, though loosely disguised as academic study, was ultimately commercial. After failed negotiations with the Louvre, the bulk of Luigi's collection was purchased by the new Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he would controversially become its first director. Alessandro's collection, however, was destined for the auction rooms of London, the heart of an empire whose collectors were hungry for antiquities from across the globe.

The crates arrived, filled with pottery, sculpture, and gold. And here, in the meticulous, if self-serving, documentation of the collection, the first crucial piece of our puzzle falls into place. In 1881, in preparation for a publication designed to legitimize and advertise the collection, it was photographed. An image of our jug, reversed in the printing process but unmistakably the same object, was included in Alessandro's grand album, “Lawrence - Cesnola Collection: Cypriot Antiquities Excavated by Major Alexander Palma di Cesnola 1876-79. Plate 13.” This photograph, now preserved in the Wellcome Collection, is the first definitive proof of the jug’s existence and its association with Alessandro’s digs. It is our first snapshot in time, a vital link in the chain of custody.

Two years later, the collection went to market. The prestigious auction house of Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge prepared for a massive, multi-day sale that was a major event in the London art world. In the introduction to the catalogue for the auction commencing on June 1st, 1883, the financier Edwin Lawrence laid out the history of the collection. And within that catalogue, another photograph, this one preserved in the University of Cambridge Digital Library, captured the jug again. Under lot 277, it was listed for sale. On that day, in the charged atmosphere of the saleroom, the hammer fell. The jug, once a sacred offering, now a commercial commodity, was sold.

Part 4: The General, The Fascist, and a Private Museum (1883-1966)

Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers

The winning bidder was Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, one of the most important and visionary figures in the history of archaeology. A career soldier like Cesnola, Pitt-Rivers was his antithesis in every other way. Where Cesnola saw treasure and personal glory, Pitt-Rivers saw data. He was a methodologist who believed that all objects, from the grandest sculpture to the most common pot, had a story to tell about human development. He pioneered the idea of arranging collections not by culture or date, but by "typology", grouping similar objects together to demonstrate the gradual "evolution" of human ideas and forms, from the simple to the complex.

In 1884, he donated his first, vast collection to the University of Oxford, founding the renowned Pitt Rivers Museum. It is crucial to note that this primary museum, the one in Oxford, is not part of this story of sale and dispersal. Our jug went somewhere else entirely. After inheriting a vast estate in 1880, the General established a second, private museum on his lands in Farnham, Dorset, intended to educate the local population. It was here, in Room IV, the Pottery Room, that our jug was placed on the 8th of August, 1896, meticulously catalogued as part of his typological series. For decades it sat, a quiet example in a grand theory of cultural evolution, an object of science rather than commerce.

Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham - Room IV - Pottery Room - Jug in Top Right Middle

In this vast library of material culture, amidst thousands of other pots from around the world arranged to show the development of handles, spouts, and decoration, our jug took its place. Upon the General’s death in 1900, the estate and the private Farnham museum passed to his family, eventually landing in the hands of his grandson, Captain George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers. George was a dark and complex figure, a man whose intellectual pursuits curdled into fanaticism. An anthropologist and eugenicist, he became obsessed with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler. His academic work on "ethnogenics" was deeply entwined with a belief in racial hierarchies. In the 1935 general election, he stood for Parliament as an "Independent Agriculturist" with backing from Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. He was so virulently pro-Nazi, attending the Nuremberg Rally in 1937 and claiming to be "working for Hitler", that after the outbreak of World War II, MI5 put him under surveillance. In 1940, he was arrested and interned as a national security risk. The jug, once a symbol of life and rebirth, now sat in the collection of a man who championed an ideology of death and racial purity.

Part 5: The Spy’s Inheritance and the Great Dispersal (1966-1975)

Stella Lonsdale

George Pitt-Rivers’ life remained turbulent and controversial. After the war, he began a relationship with a woman named Stella Lonsdale, whose own story reads like a spy thriller. Trapped in France during the war, Stella’s life was a shadowy tale of espionage and intrigue. She was interrogated by the Gestapo, possibly recruited as an agent by a lover who worked for the Germans, and later made her way to England. Here, MI5, deeply suspicious of her activities and contacts, arrested her on suspicion of being a German spy. She was imprisoned in Holloway, at one point sharing a cell with the famous French double-agent Mathilde Carré, known as "La Chatte."

This unlikely pair, the fascist aristocrat and the suspected spy, remained together after the war, though they never married. When George died in 1966, he left a substantial portion of his fortune, including the Farnham museum and all its contents, to Stella. With little sentiment for the General's grand scientific project or her late partner's dark ideologies, Stella made a pragmatic decision. In the 1970s, she closed the museum and prepared everything for sale.

Sotheby's - 24th of February 1975 - Lot 168

And so, on the 24th of February 1975, the jug found itself back where it had been 92 years earlier: on the auction block at Sotheby’s in London. Listed as lot 168 in a sale of antiquities and tribal art, the little bird that had begun its journey in a Cypriot tomb was once again sold to the highest bidder. The General's second great collection, his carefully assembled typological world, was scattered to the winds.

Part 6: The Detective Work and a Journey’s End

The buyer in 1975 was Charles Ede Ltd., a then-new but soon-to-be-leading London gallery specializing in antiquities. This purchase marked the beginning of the jug's modern, well-documented life, a stark contrast to the chaos of its earlier history. In May 1976, it was sold to Dr. Ian Mueller, a distinguished professor of ancient philosophy and mathematics at the University of Chicago. After its time in the possession of soldiers, treasure hunters, and ideologues, the jug found a quiet home with a man whose life was dedicated to rigorous, intellectual inquiry; a spirit the old General Pitt-Rivers would have admired.

Dr. Ian Mueller - May 1961

Over the next four decades, the jug passed through the quiet, documented world of reputable dealers and dedicated collectors. It moved from Dr. Mueller to the dealer Harlan J Berk, back to Charles Ede, on to a private collector named Margaret Janet Bourne, and then back to Charles Ede one last time. This peaceful chapter stands in stark relief to the turbulence of its past.

While the jug's journey was outlined in various sale catalogues and collection inventories, it was the survival of the key photographs that transformed this paper trail into irrefutable proof. In the complex world of antiquities, establishing an object’s provenance is paramount, and visual evidence is the ultimate arbiter. The 1881 photograph in Alessandro Cesnola’s album provides the visual smoking gun, definitively linking this specific jug to its pre-1883 excavation. The 1883 Sotheby's catalogue, with its own image, then visually confirms its transfer to General Pitt-Rivers.

This unbroken, visually verified chain of custody is critically important in the 21st century. It provides the concrete evidence necessary to prove the jug is compliant with the 1970 UNESCO Convention, demonstrating that it was exported from Cyprus long before the treaty's establishment. Thanks to the foresight of 19th-century documenters and the diligence of modern libraries, the jug's extraordinary provenance is not just a story, but a verifiable fact in a field often clouded by ambiguity.

Epilogue: A Pause in the Netherlands

For twenty-seven centuries the bird has been held motionless, yet the jug itself has been swept through the currents of history, passed between men driven by discovery, science, ideology, and commerce. This long and messy journey found its latest chapter in the spring of 2025, at an art fair in the Netherlands. It was there that the jug was acquired by the Drakopoulos Collection, bringing its passage through the private market to a close.

Its acquisition marks a significant new phase in its story. For the first time in over a century, it is not simply a commodity or a private curiosity, but an object of study intended for public engagement. It is now available for loan to museums and will soon be shared with the public, its travels and the stories of its many owners finally told. Today, resting in the Netherlands, the jug's constant motion has, for now, come to a pause. It remains a silent witness, but its story is silent no more.