Tracing the Lotus Amphora

On Thursday, 11 November 1926, Sotheby & Co. opened a two-day sale of “Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Cypriot Antiquities” in its galleries at 34 & 35 New Bond Street. The cover of the catalogue names the property of the late Sir Philip Burne-Jones, sold by order of his executors, and of four other owners, and ends with “and other properties”. The first 147 lots of the first day came from the other properties. They were headed “A Collection of Cypriot Antiquities”, and no owner is named, on the cover or anywhere else in the book.

Lot 23 was one of the collection's four big two-handled amphorae, which the cataloguer called “diotas”:

Plate III shows it on the right, beside lot 44, a second amphora of the same height.

The copy of the catalogue in the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a rare one. Bound in at the back is the printed list of prices and buyers' names that Sotheby's issued after the sale, and it shows the hammer coming down on lot 23 at £3 5s, the price of thirteen illustrated copies of the catalogue at five shillings each. The buyer was Zachariades. He also took lot 44 and the other two big diotas, fifty-one lots of the Cypriot collection in all, for £76 3s.

The rest of the list reads like any other sale. Lot 65, a barrel-shaped bottle sold with “a Horn or Trumpet, 12 in. high, the last very rare”, made 12s. Lot 102, a marble slab with two raised hands carved above a Greek prayer to the Sun, made £2. Zachariades bought both. On the second day a buyer called Petrakides took a block of thirteen lots, 305 to 317, and every one of them went either to him or to nobody.

Ninety-eight years later the amphora was back in a New Bond Street saleroom. On 4 July 2024 Bonhams sold it as lot 139, “a large Cypriot Bichrome Ware amphora decorated with lotus flowers”, 65 centimetres high and dated to Cypro-Archaic I, about 750–600 BC. Its history took one line, “Edward Varley Kayley (d.1974) collection; and thence by descent to the present owner”, and went no further back.

The London gallery ArtAncient bought it and recognised it on Plate III of the 1926 catalogue, and in January 2025 we acquired it from the gallery. Set beside a photograph of the amphora today, the plate agrees feature for feature, and the catalogue's description can be read against it phrase by phrase.

Most of the description is easy to follow with the amphora in view: the “lotus flowers above the handles”, for instance, are the red volute flowers painted over each handle. “Kition fabric” is a much rarer phrase, and we will come back to it.

The November catalogue can be leafed through, with a reading glass, in The Paper Trail.

We began with the other Sotheby's antiquities catalogues of the years either side of 1926, in case the collection, or its owner, had passed through the saleroom before. The first match was lot 102, the slab with the prayer to the Sun, which asks the Sun to find and punish whoever killed a woman called Kalliope. On 22 March 1926, eight months before the November sale, the same slab, measurements and all, had been sold in the same rooms as lot 147 of “The Property of Mr. M. M. Petrakides”, and knocked down for £13 to a buyer called Thomas.

In March the cataloguer had called the inscription “difficult to decipher” and printed a halting version of it. By November the entry carried a clean translation. Everything else was copied across, down to the three pieces the slab had been broken into.

The slab was the first of many. A 24-inch diota of the June sale reappears in November with the same “diamonds winged in between”; a large jug of the July sale is November's lot 12, word for word; and lot after lot of the November collection turned out to have been through a Sotheby's saleroom already that year, in one of three sales.

The March sale names its Cypriot owners on the title page: “Mr. H. Malis, of Nicosia, Cyprus” (lots 1–37) and “Mr. M. M. Petrakides” (lots 38–192). The June sale was led by Greek vases, “The Property of John Bateman, Esq. (deceased)”, with an unnamed collection of Cypriot pottery among the “Properties from various sources”. The July sale was headed by the property of Mrs John Garstang, wife of the Director of the British School of Archaeology in Palestine, and included “A Fine Collection of Cypriot Antiquities”, lots 265–462, again with no owner named. An auction house selling the same object twice in a year is unusual enough. Here a whole collection was being sold a second time, its descriptions copied out of the earlier catalogues.

Finding repeats one at a time could not show how much of the collection had been sold before, or which lots had not, so we set out to match the whole November collection against all three earlier sales, lot by lot.

The November collection has 147 lots, and the three earlier sales 443 Cypriot lots between them; the lots that matched nothing would matter as much as the ones that did. The matching is slower than it sounds. Cataloguers abridged and rearranged; three small vases of July could become part of a bigger lot in November; heights were rounded; and two different lots can share a sentence, as July's 368 and 369 do. Every candidate pair was compared for the kind of object, the decoration, the measurements and the find-spot, and a pair still in doubt was counted only when nothing else fitted.

The result: 133 of the 147 November lots had been offered earlier in 1926. Fourteen had not, and lot 23 is one of the fourteen.

The fourteen are the best things in the sale. Six of them are illustrated on the plates, both amphorae on Plate III among them, and lot 63 fetched the highest price of the collection. The photographs agree: the July catalogue shows its objects cut out against a blank ground, while the November plates are a new set, the pots standing on a board in front of a backdrop, and the newcomers were photographed with everything else.

Nothing in the catalogue says where the newcomers came from, but their wording does. Lot 23 is written exactly like the big diotas of the July sale, down to “Kition fabric; c. 8th Cent. B.C.”, and three of the newcomers carry July's find-spot labels, “from Salamis” and “from Athieno”. The phrase “Kition fabric” settles it. It first appears in June 1926, and November is the last time it is used in a newly written entry. Whoever wrote lot 23 had written the summer's catalogues, and the newcomers read like more of the summer's stock.

For March, June and July no printed list of buyers survives. The buyers have to come from annotated copies, catalogues in which someone in the saleroom wrote each price and buyer beside the lots as they were knocked down, and the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has all three.

They are hard reading. The hand is quick and abbreviating. Prices sit in ruled pound and shilling columns, so “1 | 6” is £1 6s and not sixteen of anything; a run of lots to one buyer is marked “do”, for ditto, so a name can only be read once the start of its run is found; and some names are spelt as they were heard.

Two names run through all three copies. In March, Thomas, who had paid £13 for the slab, bought lot after lot of the Petrakides property and not one of Malis's; in June he bought only inside the unnamed collection of Cypriot pottery. In July a second name appears, “Vagliano”, buying across the Fine Collection of Cypriot Antiquities, and on one page of the second day, 23 July, the two alternate: Vagliano at lots 330 and 333, Thomas at 334 and 343.

Laid over the map of the November sale, the margins fit it lot for lot. Every lot Thomas bought in March, June and July came back in November, and so did Vagliano's, apart from seven small pieces. The November “Collection of Cypriot Antiquities” was, almost entirely, the summer's purchases of two buyers, sold again with fourteen new pieces added.

The slab that Thomas bought for £13 in March made £2 in November. Most lots fell less far, but only five of the 130 rose. Each line below runs from what Thomas or Vagliano paid in the summer to what the same lot made in November.

Thomas paid £260 8s for 79 lots, and in November the same objects fetched £108 3s. Vagliano's lots that came back had cost £141 6s and fetched £51 10s. Taken together, November paid about two-fifths of the summer's prices, four to eight months later, and Sotheby's took its commission a second time.

The margins and the printed list give the buyers as bare surnames. With context and careful research, some of them could be identified, and others led to probable matches with people we know were involved with Cypriot antiquities.

Two buyers who pay full price in the summer and accept two-fifths in November are behaving very strangely, unless they were never really buyers. An auctioneer of the time had two ways of recording a lot that failed to reach its reserve. It could be marked “Passed”, or it could be knocked down to a name, sometimes the owner's, sometimes a name kept for the purpose, which the clerk wrote in the book like any other. The second way kept the room from seeing what had not sold.

Three things in the margins point that way. The first is where Thomas bid. In March he took 58 of the 155 Petrakides lots and not one of Malis's 37, which went to the ordinary trade at much the same prices. A dealer looking for cheap Cypriot pots would have bought from both. Had Thomas bid without regard to whose lots they were, a split as lopsided as this would come about by chance about four times in ten million.

The second is the word “Passed”. Not one lot of the Petrakides property or of the two unnamed collections is marked with it, while Malis's 26-inch diota, which nobody would buy, is marked “Passed” in the same March catalogue. The third is the prices. Thomas and Vagliano paid a round sum, whole pounds or pounds and ten shillings, for 46 per cent of their lots, and the other buyers in the same sections for 26 per cent; a reserve is usually set at a round figure.

Each of these might have an innocent explanation on its own. With the lots that came back, the losses and the fourteen newcomers, they make eleven exhibits, set out below against four ways of explaining them. Choose an explanation to see which exhibits it accounts for and which tell against it.

Petrakides also appears among the buyers. In June the annotator wrote “Petrakedis” and “Petrakedes” against five lots of gold and seals from another property. On 12 November, the day after the amphora was sold, he took some of the block of lots 305 to 317 at prices from 10s to £9 and let the rest pass, as an owner protecting his own goods would.

If this reading is right, the amphora was consigned in November 1926 by the same owner as the rest, almost certainly a Cypriot vendor with stock fresh from the island, who had held it back from the summer sales or received it later. Only Sotheby's own day books and vendors' ledgers for 1926, which record who consigned each lot and on whose account it was “sold”, can prove it.

Some of these objects had been in the ground very recently. The March catalogue says that two of Malis's lots were “found in the Karpas in 1924”, that a hand-made chariot group came from Phlamoudhi the same year, and that the Petrakides slab was “found at Enkomi in 1923”. The amphora has no find-spot at all, but it reached London with this stock. How did a few hundred Cypriot antiquities leave the island in 1925 and 1926?

Under the Antiquities Law of 1905 a share of every chance find went to the government, excavation needed a permit, and nothing could be exported without the written permission of the High Commissioner (from 1925 the Governor) after the objects had been shown to the Cyprus Museum. In practice the museum's curator, Menelaos Markides, inspected exports himself and allowed fewer than twenty a year. A piece “found at Enkomi in 1923” could leave legally only if it had been declared as a chance find and then licensed.

The colony's Blue Books record the declared value of the antiquities exported each year. To the United Kingdom: £61 in 1924, £71 in 1925, £202 in 1926. The Cypriot lots of the March sale alone fetched several hundred pounds at auction. Declared values were whatever the shipper wrote on his export list, and antiquities paid no duty, so a low figure proves nothing by itself; the June and July collections could fit inside the £202 of 1926 at a few shillings a piece. The March consignment of 192 lots fits the figure for 1925 very badly.

The one Nicosia newspaper that survives for these years, the weekly Kypriakos Fylax, has nothing on these sales in any issue from 1923 to 1927. Other sources describe the climate. A correspondent in Nicosia wrote in December 1925 that “at Lampousa the field has been laid open for illicit digging, but so too have all other ancient sites.” Enkomi was being robbed in these years, and a Famagusta collector, G. B. Palma, is recorded as buying from the looters there. In December 1927 Rupert Gunnis, the Governor's private secretary and a member of the Cyprus Museum Committee, had two Famagusta buyers raided and their antiquities confiscated, and in 1928 the government opened a file on measures to stop antiquities being smuggled out through the ports.

None of this shows how the amphora travelled. The curator's export permits for 1924–26 and his register of the private collections of Larnaca, both in the Cyprus State Archives in Nicosia, may yet name the stock and its owner.

After November 1926 the trail goes blank, and the only way to pick it up was to read the later Sotheby's catalogues for a Cypriot amphora of 27 inches. It turns up on 21 March 1932, in “The Property of a Gentleman. Collection of Cypriot Vases”, lots 79 to 96. Lot 85 is the 1926 entry, shortened, with the same height and with “Kition fabric” moved to the front.

The Gentleman's collection is full of Zachariades's November purchases. Lot 79 is November's lot 44, the other amphora on Plate III; lots 81 and 88 are November's 46 and 22; and lot 94 holds two more of his November lots, 7 and 65, a duck-shaped vase and the pottery trumpet. The simplest reading is that the Gentleman was Zachariades, or the collector he had bought for, selling up six years later.

At first the sale looked like another dead end, because no copy could be found with a single pencil mark in it. Then, at the very end of the Met's copy, after the plates, came the printed list of buyers, bound in as in 1926. Lot 85: “Hadbrook”, £5. Hadbrook also bought lots 79 and 80. The two amphorae photographed side by side on Plate III had been bought together by Zachariades in 1926, and six years later they were bought together again.

Hadbrook is where the trail goes cold. The name is printed the same way three times, so it is not a slip in a single line, yet the surname barely exists in England: there is no Hadbrook in the probate calendars from 1900 to 1995, none in the London Gazette, none in any other sale list we have read. It does occur in the United States. Hadbrook may have been a visitor, or the clerk may have caught a name wrongly and repeated it.

The amphora's trail stops at Hadbrook. One of its companions can be followed further: the trumpet of November's lot 65, “the last very rare”. In 1932 it was sold again with the duck-shaped vase as lot 94, “a Trumpet in pottery, 12 in. long”, to a buyer called Smart for £1. It had been through the saleroom before November as well. In March 1926 it was half of lot 100 of the Petrakides property, knocked down to Thomas for £3 15s, in the words that November would repeat.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has a terracotta trumpet, or salpinx, 30.6 centimetres long, which is twelve inches, given by Sir John Beazley in 1937 and numbered AN1937.158. The museum's online record says nothing about where it came from. The catalogue of an exhibition of the Beazleys' gifts, printed in 1967, does: “Once, Petrakides Collection”. Neither the November catalogue nor the 1932 one printed that name, yet it stayed with the trumpet for four decades. It is very probably the trumpet of these three sales, although how it passed from Smart to Beazley is not recorded.

The slab with the prayer to the Sun can be followed too, on paper at least. F. Cumont published it from the sale catalogue, in the proceedings of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology for 1926–27 and again in Syria in 1933, and it entered the corpus of Greek inscriptions as SEG VI 803. Where it is now is not known.

The next fixed point is 1974. Edward Varley Kayley was born in Kent in 1900 and died at Woking, Surrey, in 1974. He collected Chinese ceramics and paintings, and Bonhams' catalogue of his Chinese collection says that he bought at local auctions and antique sales and through Collet's Chinese Bookshop in London, and that from 1969 until his death he was Supreme Magus of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a Masonic order. Two other antiquities from his collection were sold at Bonhams with the amphora, an Etruscan amphora and a South Italian red-figure plate. Lots 79 and 80 of 1932 were not among them.

How the amphora passed from Hadbrook to Kayley is unknown. A man who bought “from local auctions and antique sales” sounds like a buyer of the 1950s and 1960s, less like a bidder at Sotheby's in 1932, and the amphora probably went through at least one more pair of hands in between.

Most of the searching found nothing. The dead ends are listed here with the finds, so that nobody picking up the trail has to repeat them.

The chain as it stands: a Cypriot vendor, most probably M. M. Petrakides; Sotheby's, 11 November 1926, lot 23, to Zachariades; Sotheby's, 21 March 1932, lot 85, to Hadbrook; forty-two years without a record; Edward Varley Kayley and his family; Bonhams, 2024; ArtAncient; the Drakopoulos Collection.

Three sets of documents would close most of the gaps. Sotheby's sale books for 1926 and 1932 record every consignor and every buyer with an address, and the British Library holds the firm's own set of marked catalogues, which may carry the vendors' names. In Nicosia, the curator's export permits and his register of Larnaca collections may name Petrakides and his stock. And the Ashmolean's accession register may say where Beazley found the trumpet in the 1930s. Those are the questions we are now putting to the archives, and their answers will be added here.

The other amphora on Plate III

In November 1926 the amphora was photographed beside lot 44, a diota of the same height, with bands of grouped circles round its shoulder, winged lozenges on its neck and lotus flowers above its handles. Both were among the fourteen newcomers. Zachariades bought both, for £3 5s and £2 15s; in 1932 they were offered together again, as lots 85 and 79, and Hadbrook bought both. In 2024 one of them came to Bonhams from the Kayley family. Lot 44 has not been traced since 1932.

A hundred years after the two amphorae stood side by side for Plate III, one of them is in the Drakopoulos Collection. If you know where the other is, or recognise it from the plate, we would like to hear from you through the contact page.