Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers

Augustus Henry Lane Fox, who took the name Pitt Rivers in 1880, was chief among the buyers at the four Lawrence-Cesnola sales at Sotheby's, where Ulbrich and Kiely count 693 items bought by him².

He was born on 14 April 1827 at Bramham, Yorkshire, and died on 4 May 1900¹². He served as a Grenadier Guards officer and retired in 1882 with the honorary rank of lieutenant-general. In 1880 he inherited the Rivers estates in Wiltshire and Dorset and took the name Pitt Rivers^5,12. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1864¹². Brown found no evidence that he ever served in Cyprus⁵.

The Cesnola sales of 1871

As Colonel Fox, he is named among the buyers at the London sales of Luigi Palma di Cesnola's antiquities at Sotheby's in 1871¹. Masson identifies two of his May lots: lot 142, nine small Golgoi ex-votos labelled "Ruins Golgoi temple 1865", and lot 48, a vase with a bull, a man and a bird. They are now in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford as 1884.56/91-99 and 1884.38/2803¹. On 4 May 1871 he exhibited Cypriot pieces "from the Cesnola collection" at the Society of Antiquaries, at the meeting where Thomas Backhouse Sandwith read his paper^7,8. Ulbrich and Kiely add a second showing in 1873². Brown, quoting Myres, says many of the Cypriot objects were "acquired by General Pitt Rivers from General Louis Palma di Cesnola", and that Pitt Rivers was in contact with both Cesnola brothers⁵.

The Lawrence-Cesnola sales

The collection that Alexander Palma di Cesnola had excavated in 1876 to 1879 was sold at Sotheby's in four sales: in 1883, on 15 May 1884, on 12 March 1888 and on 25 April 1892^1,2. Edwin Henry Lawrence was the consignor^1,4. Masson names Pitt Rivers among the buyers in 1884 and 1888. In 1892 he bought lot 136, an androgynous terracotta centaur with a crested helmet, lot 487, a statuette of Aphrodite with a Cypriot inscription (ICS 315), and lots 607, 609 and 611, which were bird vases¹.

Kiely, citing Petch, breaks his purchases down as 200 items in 1883, 120 in 1884, 218 in 1888 and 123 in 1892, which totals 661 and differs from the 693 of Ulbrich and Kiely^2,4. Lots 777 and 778 of 1888, a limestone potter, a donkey with panniers, a dog and a terracotta head, cost a guinea each⁴.

Two collections

Pitt Rivers built up two collections. The First Collection was shown at Bethnal Green from 1874 to 1878 and at South Kensington from 1878 to 1884, with about 200 Cypriot items, and was given to Oxford from 1884^2,5. The Second Collection, which held most of the Lawrence-Cesnola purchases, went to the private museum he founded in 1885 at Farnham in Dorset, not to Oxford^1,5. He recorded it in a nine-volume manuscript catalogue, hand-coloured and giving provenance and price for each piece, which is in Cambridge University Library⁴.

Ulbrich and Kiely say the Cypriot finds served the anthropological purpose of illustrating the daily lives and customs of the ancient islanders, and Kiely adds that he also bought Cypriot ethnographic objects at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886^2,4.

After 1900

The Farnham museum stayed open after his death; a guidebook appeared in 1929. Legal problems led his heirs to treat the collection as private property, and sales began in the 1950s. The museum closed after George Pitt Rivers died in 1966, and anonymous sales at Sotheby's followed in the 1960s and 1970s^4,5. The centaur reappeared at Sotheby's and was studied by Vassos Karageorghis in 1991⁵. The limestone potter and a limestone hound eating a rabbit, which shared a page of the Pitt Rivers catalogue with it, are now in the British Museum after passing through Charles Ede Ltd. The museum acquired the hound in 2012⁴. Lot 607 of 1892, the bird oenochoe, is in the Ashmolean Museum¹.

Karageorghis studied the Oxford holdings in 1997 and 1998, found that few of them had been published, and noted that a large part of the collection had been given away or sold after the General's death⁶.