Museums as Sellers: Deaccessioned Cypriot Antiquities on the Market

Some of the Cypriot antiquities on the market today were once the property of a museum. They left Cyprus lawfully in the nineteenth century, entered a public collection, and were later judged surplus and sold, given away or exchanged. The largest single release was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's sale of Cesnola "duplicates", which ended with two auctions at the Anderson Galleries in New York in March and April 1928. Museums in Britain gave away their own Cypriot "duplicates" from the 1890s, and the Cyprus Museum ran a saleroom from 1926 until 1991. The practice continues: in 2016 the Toledo Museum of Art sold Cypriot pieces at Christie's "to benefit the acquisitions fund", and in 2023 the Art Institute of Chicago sold a Cypriot stele the same way. A deaccessioned object carries a museum number, a register entry and a sale record, so its route through the twentieth century can be checked. That is why buyers value them. The record also has an illicit side: objects stolen from museum stores and excavation storerooms, numbers erased to hide them, and claims of a museum history that the registers do not support. The head of a young man at the top of this page is a Cesnola limestone that stayed at the Metropolitan; heads of the same group went through the 1928 sales and are on the market today.

The Metropolitan Museum and the Cesnola duplicates

Luigi Palma di Cesnola sold his Cypriot collection to the Metropolitan in 1874 and 1876. Of the thirty-five thousand objects he removed from Cyprus, about six thousand remain in the Museum [1, p. 23]. The rest left in stages, most of them after the Museum had bought them.

The first large release went to California. One Metropolitan catalogue records 5,000 terracottas "considered as duplicates" sold to Leland Stanford "as of 1896" [2, p. 22]; another dates a private sale of duplicates to Stanford to 1885 [5, p. 17]. Stanford's share is now in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. In the early 1900s the Museum also sold pieces "over-the-counter", mostly to private buyers [1, p. 23; 5, p. 17]. The Museum's stone sculpture catalogue says that the duplicates had been set aside before the First World War, together with objects from other sources, and that their sale "took place between 1916 and 1926" [2, p. 23]. John Myres, engaged by the Museum in April 1909 to rearrange and label the collection, worked from the reduced collection that remained [2, pp. 22–23].

The final sales were two auctions at the Anderson Galleries, 489 Park Avenue, under the title Cypriote & Classical Antiquities: Duplicates of the Cesnola & Other Collections, Sold by Order of the Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Part One, sale number 2253, ran over three sessions on 30 and 31 March 1928 and numbered 654 lots [3, lots 1–654]. Part Two, sale number 2260, ran over two sessions on 21 and 22 April 1928 and numbered 312 lots [4, lots 1–312; 2, p. 23]. Many lots were groups: lot 1 of Part One was nineteen marble and limestone fragments, and several lots were "100 fragments of ancient Roman glass" from the Julien Gréau collection, which the Museum had also owned [3, lots 1, 411–413, 652–654]. The 966 lots therefore held several thousand objects. The catalogue entries are short and refer to the Cesnola Atlas or the Museum's handbook by plate or page, which is why the pieces can still be identified.

The catalogue opens with a letter from the Museum's president, Robert W. de Forest, to the president of the Anderson Galleries, dated 14 February 1928. It gives the Trustees' reasons. The objects were "similar in character" to those on show and were held "in storage where they perform no useful service"; the Trustees had "earlier considered distributing them among other American museums", but that "would have involved questions of discrimination and would have delayed vacating space for which the museum has urgent and immediate need". They hoped to place the objects "in as many museums, colleges, libraries and private houses as possible" [3, letter of 14 February 1928]. The printed conditions of sale were those of any New York auction of the time: the house would "not be responsible for the correctness of the description, authenticity, genuineness" of any lot and sold "each lot exactly as it is, without recourse" [4, Conditions of Sale].

The buyers were institutions and private collectors. The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota bought two thousand three hundred objects [1, p. 23]. There is "no complete record of the destination of the pieces" [1, p. 23]. Some came back to the Metropolitan as gifts in 1941, and the Museum has since placed others on long-term loan, including five sculptures to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia [2, p. 23].

The British distributions of the 1880s and 1890s

In Britain the same idea took the form of gifts. The Cyprus Exploration Fund was financed by subscribers, among them museums, and paid them in finds. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge "was prominent among museums which subscribed", and "as a result received division material from the excavations at Palaepaphos, Leondari Vouno, Marion and the sanctuary at Limniti, and from Salamis between 1888 and 1891" [7, p. 9]. The excavators' share came to Britain under the division of finds, which is set out on firmans and partage.

The British Museum then gave away part of its own share. Its Amathus excavations of 1893 and 1894 were paid for by Emma Turner's bequest. In January 1895 the Trustees agreed to a proposal from A. S. Murray, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, "to donate 'duplicates' from these excavations at Amathus to a range of other museums, colleges and public schools across the UK". The duplicates were described as "consisting chiefly of pottery and glass of a kind very common in Cyprus and already well represented in the Museum" [6, p. 10]. One of the recipients, the Yorkshire College in Leeds, accepted on 25 January 1895. Its collection was then forgotten, and it came to light in storage in 1913 with its source unknown [6, p. 10]. That is common with these gifts: a school or college receives a box of pots, records it briefly or not at all, and a century later sells or disposes of it with no paper. Many of the Cypriot pots that leave British school and college collections today are probably of this kind, although the link to a particular gift has to be proved piece by piece.

The Cyprus Museum's own sales

The Cyprus Museum sold from its own stores for sixty-five years. Under the 1905 law its committee could sell or exchange "duplicate specimens", and from 1926 Rupert Gunnis ran a saleroom in the Museum courtyard; the Department of Antiquities kept selling until the practice was abolished in 1991 [17]. Those sales are told in full on the Cyprus Museum saleroom and in the article how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities. For this page the point is that the state museum of Cyprus was, for most of the twentieth century, a seller in the same market as the Metropolitan. Its sales carried a museum label and an export permit, described on export licences and labels, and a piece that still has them is documented in the same way as a piece from the 1928 auctions.

Modern deaccessions in the auction record

Museums still sell Cypriot antiquities, and the major auction houses state it on the lot. The headings name the institution and, often, the use of the money.

The sources are the lot records [8; 9; 11]. The Toledo antiquities were sold in two parts, a live auction in New York on 25 October 2016 and an online sale that ended the next day [10]. The museum said the Cypriot head "had not been displayed for several decades" and kept a second votive head from Golgoi that it judged "more sensitively carved" [18]. Cyprus's ambassador in Washington, Leonidas Pantelides, asked the museum to postpone the sale and keep the objects, and offered the embassy's help with events around them; Cyprus did not ask for the objects to be returned [10; 18]. The head sold for more than twice its high estimate [8; 10].

The chain on the Chicago stele is complete from the 1870s: Cesnola, the Metropolitan, the Anderson Galleries in 1928, a private collector by 1970, a gift to the Art Institute in 1971 with its accession number, and a sale in 2023 [11]. A Cypriot limestone head of Artemis sold at Christie's in 2025 had passed from the Metropolitan, "deaccessioned circa 1920s", to the collection of Charles Noyes de Forest (1905–1929) and his family; it had already been sold once at Christie's, New York, on 6 December 2007, lot 144 [12]. The same piece can therefore appear several times in the auction record, each sale adding a line to its printed history.

Other institutions appear in the record as sellers of Cypriot pieces they did not deaccession in the strict sense: a university selling a bequest for a named programme, or a family recovering a long-term loan from a museum store. The catalogue wording distinguishes them, and so should a buyer.

The rules museums follow when they sell

Museums in the United States and Britain may sell from their collections, but their professional bodies limit when and how. The American Alliance of Museums' Code of Ethics for Museums requires that proceeds from deaccessioned collections be used only for acquisition or the direct care of collections [13]. The Association of Art Museum Directors' Policy on Deaccessioning is stricter for art museums: proceeds may go only to buying new works, and members who break the rule face sanctions [14]. The Toledo heading, "sold to benefit the acquisitions fund", is that rule printed on the lot. In Britain the Museums Association's Code of Ethics for Museums (2015) and its Disposal Toolkit treat disposal as part of responsible collections management, prefer transfer to another public collection, and allow sale for money only in exceptional cases, after other sources of funding have been tried [15]. Under all three codes a deaccession is decided by the governing body, minuted, and recorded against the accession number. A buyer can ask the selling museum for that record.

The illicit side: thefts, erased numbers and invented museum histories

The illicit counterpart to the museum sale is the museum theft. The losses that matter for Cyprus are those of the occupied north after the Turkish invasion of 1974. The museums and excavation stores there, what they held and what is known of their fate are set out on museums and excavation stores in the north. The best-documented case is one store. The Harvard and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston expedition at Toumba tou Skourou near Morphou reported 240 objects missing from its storerooms. In October 1982 the University of Virginia's Bayly Museum accepted twenty Cypriot pots as a gift from the Turkish Cypriot authorities. When the Director of Antiquities, Vassos Karageorghis, examined them in January 1983, most "showed signs of earlier catalogue numbers which had been erased and replaced by new numbering for the donation". Two still carried their Toumba tou Skourou numbers. In March 1983 the university's president sent those two to the Cypriot Embassy in Washington and returned the other eighteen to the donors, against the recommendation of his own faculty committee [16, pp. 362–363].

The case shows what a museum number does. A number fixes an object to an institution and a date. Removing it is the first step in hiding a theft, and a number that survives is what identifies the object. The same logic runs the other way: a seller can claim a museum history that the object does not have. Old catalogue numbers, a label in an old hand or a collection mark are easy to imitate and hard to check without the register. Fakes and invented histories on the modern market are covered on the companion pages of this section. No documented theft of Cypriot objects from a museum outside Cyprus has been found for this page.

The evidence against reading "ex-museum" as clean

A museum history settles the question of export, not every question about the object.

The first problem is how the objects were dug. Cesnola's work was large-scale tomb clearance with hired labour, and the Metropolitan's own catalogues treat his findspots with caution. Myres "considered the information about findspots provided by Cesnola unreliable" and left them out of his Handbook altogether [2, p. 23]. A Cesnola head is lawfully exported in the sense that it left the island under the rules of its time and was bought openly by a public museum. It is not a recorded excavation find, and its "said to be from Golgoi" is Cesnola's word. Legally exported is not the same as legally or scientifically excavated, and the pages on tomb-digging in Ottoman Cyprus set out what that meant.

The second problem is that "duplicates" is the museum's word. The Metropolitan's "duplicates" of 1928 included sculpture now valued in tens of thousands of dollars, and the Cyprus Museum's sales were criticised at the time for the risk of selling things that were not really duplicates [17]. Deaccession also moves objects out of public view into private hands, and the Cypriot ambassador's request to Toledo in 2016 rested on that point [10].

The third problem is the record itself. There is "no complete record" of where the 1928 lots went [1, p. 23], and a later catalogue entry can carry a lot number or date that was copied at second hand. A claim of a museum history has to be checked against the printed catalogue and the museum's register, not taken from a later sale.

These points are real, and they qualify the history of each object. They do not change the answer to the question the modern market asks, which is whether the object left Cyprus lawfully and when. For a piece with a Metropolitan number, an Anderson Galleries lot and a later museum accession, the answer is yes, and long before 1970.

What this means for an object on the market today

A Cypriot antiquity that was once in a museum is among the best-documented things on the market. Its export is usually a century or more old; the institution kept a register; the deaccession, gift or sale was recorded; and the major houses print the chain on the lot. Cesnola pieces can be checked against the Atlas, Myres's Handbook, the Anderson Galleries catalogues of 1928 and, for many, the Metropolitan's own collection records. British pieces from the Amathus gifts or the Cyprus Exploration Fund divisions are harder, because the receiving schools and colleges often recorded little. Cyprus Museum sales can be checked by the label and the export permit.

An owner who finds an old museum number, a Cesnola or Metropolitan mark, or a label from a British school or college on a Cypriot piece holds the start of a documented history. The number is worth photographing and keeping with the object. The site can help trace it against the published catalogues and registers: get in touch with a photograph of the piece and of any marks, or use identify. An object with an erased or altered number is a different case, and it is still worth asking: contact us and we will say what the marks show and what the next step is. For the general rules on selling, see selling Cypriot antiquities in the US and in the UK.