Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Cataloguer

Alfred Maskell

fl. 1885–1888 · United Kingdom

Wrote the 1885 listing of Lady Brassey's Cypriot antiquities and later designed the display of the Lady Brassey Museum at 24 Park Lane, London.

Biography

Alfred Maskell wrote the 1885 listing of the Cypriot antiquities excavated for Annie Brassey at Kourion1. She commissioned it for her 1885 exhibition at Hastings, alongside a separate catalogue of the natural-history and ethnological specimens from the Sunbeam voyages by the dealer Bryce Wright. Maskell's booklet was titled Antiquities in Cyprus, a short description of the collection of antiquities from excavations made for Lady Brassey at Cyprus. It counted about 320 pottery pieces and over 100 glass vessels, with gold ornaments, gems and an Assyrian cylinder, and Maskell said he lacked details of the exact findspots. He singled out two very large hydriai sent to Lady Brassey by Colonel Warren1.

Annie Brassey died in 1887, and Thomas Brassey completed the plans for the Lady Brassey Museum at 24 Park Lane. Maskell designed its display, which ran to 14 sections in the Durbar Hall; the Cyprus material, described as coming from tombs excavated at Curium, filled Sections 10 and 111.

From 1888 Thomas Brassey dispersed the Cypriot pieces. Fifty-nine went to Wolverhampton, and David Symons, writing in 1984, called Maskell's descriptions very cursory and could identify only 29 of the Wolverhampton pieces with certainty1. Nothing is recorded of Maskell's life outside these two commissions.

Life and work

  1. 1885
    Commissioned by Annie Brassey to write a separate listing of her Cypriot collection, 'Antiquities in Cyprus, a short description of the collection of antiquities from excavations made for Lady Brassey at Cyprus', prepared for the 1885 Hastings School of Fine Art exhibition. It counted c. 320 pottery pieces, over 100 glass vessels, gold ornaments, gems, an Assyrian cylinder, silver/lead pieces, c. 50 bronze fragments and 3 iron. He admitted he lacked details of the actual findspots and noted two very large hydriai sent to Lady Brassey by Colonel Warren.

    LondonTaylor 2001, pp. 265

  2. 1887–1888
    Designed the display of the Lady Brassey Museum (a wing of the Brassey house at 24 Park Lane), completed by Thomas Brassey after Annie Brassey's death in 1887; Cyprus material from Kourion tombs was shown in Sections 10 and 11 of 14.

    LondonTaylor 2001, p. 266

  3. 1888
    His 1885 listing became the base catalogue when Thomas Brassey dispersed the collection from 1888 (59 pieces to Wolverhampton Museum on 18 April 1888, others to Leek and elsewhere); Symons (1984) later called Maskell's descriptions very cursory and could identify only 29 Wolverhampton pieces with certainty.

    WolverhamptonTaylor 2001, p. 266

Connections

3 people
Anna (Annie) Brassey, Bar…Thomas Brassey, 1st Earl …Bryce WrightAlfred Maskell
FieldworkScholarship

Fieldwork & employment

Scholarship

Sources

  1. 1.Lou Taylor (2001). “Lady Brassey, 1870-1886: traveller, writer, collector, educator, woman of means and the fate of her Cypriot artefacts”. Cyprus in the 19th Century AD: Fact, Fancy and Fiction, 239-247. Oxford, Oxbow.
  2. 2.A. Maskell (1885). Antiquities in Cyprus, a short description of the collection of antiquities from excavations made for Lady Brassey at Cyprus.
  3. 3.M. Ohnefalsch-Richter (1886). “Das Museum und die Ausgrabungen auf Cypern seit 1878”. Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 9.