Alfred John Lawson

Alfred John Lawson (1838-1921) bought at the London sales of the Cesnola collection while living in Smyrna. Merrillees describes him as another of the numismatists active there, and he was a member of the Royal Numismatic Society from 1871. He sold coins to the British Museum in 1874, among them two Cypriot issues, and was a successful bidder at the Cesnola and Cesnola-Lawrence sales at Sotheby's between 1871 and 1892¹. The Louvre bought terracottas from his Smyrna collection in 1882, and in 1888 he lent some Myrina terracottas to the Burlington Fine Arts Club¹. Salomon Reinach noted a seated lyre-playing Eros in a Berlin case as a replica of a statuette in the Lawson collection, later acquired by the Louvre².

Reinach also reported the reply of Demosthenes Baltazzi to Hamdy Bey: that no fragment of the suspect Asia Minor terracotta groups had been seen in Smyrna, "ni chez M. Lawson", and that "M. Lawson lui-même fut dupe" of terracottas made by a man from the Piraeus². The "M. Lawson" is presumably the same collector.