C. Rollin

C. Rollin, who lived from 1813 to 1883, was the senior antiquary of the Paris firm Rollin et Feuardent, which received the first consignments from Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Jean-Pierre Masson calls Felix Feuardent (1819-1907) the antiquary Rollin's associate and then son-in-law¹. No forename or birthplace is recorded. The firm, at 12 rue Vivienne with a London branch at 61 Great Russell Street, was one of the Louvre's two large suppliers of antiquities³. Nearly everything recorded under his name is the business of the firm.

Cesnola's first lot to Paris, in 1869-70, went to Rollin et Feuardent. On 30 April 1870 he wrote to Froehner that it held at least thirty heads like one sold for 505 francs, and that Feuardent had sold two for 1,100 francs yet paid him 800 francs in Italian paper money; he called the firm "peu honorables"^1,4. Rollin was among the Paris dealers who bought at the Drouot sale of Cesnola antiquities on 25-26 March 1870¹. A small group from the Sotheby's sale of May 1871 reached the British Museum through the firm^2,5.

On 24 November 1871 Cesnola consigned 66 boxes holding 5,756 items to the London branch, to be sold en bloc or by auction through Feuardent or Sotheby's after twelve to eighteen months⁴. Ferdinand Colonna-Ceccaldi had warned against dealers such as Rollin, Hoffmann and Feuardent³. The exhibition at Great Russell Street in 1872, run by Gaston Feuardent, led to the purchase by the Metropolitan Museum². A buyer named Rollin appears at the Lawrence-Cesnola sales at Sotheby's in 1888 and 1892, five and nine years after the death of C. Rollin, and in 1892 the British Museum bought through Rollin and Feuardent inscriptions from Tamassos from the collection of Falkland Warren^2,6.