Victor Emile Gabriel Chevallier

Victor Emile Gabriel Chevallier and his wife, Marguerite Jeanne Verel, assembled in Paris a collection of roughly 240 antiquities, most of them Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Near Eastern, with Cypriot ceramics of the 11th century BC and a small Archaic limestone head².

Chevallier was born on 7 November 1889 at Frontenaud. He was an associate professor at the Lycée Montaigne in Paris, gave 44 years to civil and military service, and was named Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur on 21 March 1955². On 27 December 1928 he married Marguerite Jeanne Verel in Paris. She was born in Paris in 1887, worked as a lecturer at the Louvre, and died at Saulieu in 1962. The couple lived on the rue Jacob².

Most of the collection consists of terracottas, alabasters, a few bronzes and marbles, and above all pottery. The Greek vases are the largest group. Its centrepiece is a Roman marble statue of a youth crowned with ivy, in the Praxitellian manner, of the 1st or 2nd century AD. The ceramics also include a Mesopotamian tablet, Egyptian pieces from the Nagada period to the Ptolemaic era, Etruscan wares from the 7th century BC, and Tanagra figurines with their moulds. It also holds antique paintings, furniture, objets d'art and Far Eastern and Asian art².

The couple kept a handwritten inventory, and the ink numbers on the pieces correspond to its entries. Chevallier photographed the best objects. The inventory shows that most of the collection was acquired in the first half of the twentieth century and none of it after 1969². No dealer, sale or findspot is recorded for the Cypriot pieces.

Chevallier died at Sèvres on 9 May 1969. The couple had no heirs, and the collection was entrusted to a family friend. It has been kept in private hands through several generations, occasionally with new acquisitions, and the inventory and photographs remain with the present owners².