Louis Constantin Henri François-Xavier de Clercq

In August 1859 Louis de Clercq left Paris for the Near East with a camera, and on the way he stopped in Cyprus and made the first photographs of the island that are known today: about ten calotype paper negatives of Famagusta, Nicosia and Kiti³. The negatives were not among the 222 photographs he later published at his own expense in fifty copies as Voyage en Orient 1859-1860, and they were identified by chance at an auction in 2003³.

De Clercq was born in 1836 or 1837 (the Cypriot literature mostly gives 1836, French Wikipedia 24 December 1837 at Paris) and died on 27 December 1901 at Oignies, in the Pas-de-Calais^5,21. French Wikipedia lists him as a member of the board of the Compagnie des mines de Dourges, mayor of Oignies and deputy for the Pas-de-Calais from 1871²¹. For the 1859 voyage he travelled with the historian Emmanuel-Guillaume Rey and was to photograph monuments. In January 1860 he left Rey at Jerusalem and went on alone through Egypt and Spain³. A second journey in 1862-63 took him back to Cyprus, where he photographed monuments on the advice of the marquis de Vogüé⁶.

Péretié and the Beirut supply

De Clercq met Aimé Péretié, of the French consulate-general at Beirut, in 1859. He called him his "zélé collaborateur" and later his "pourvoyeur attitré"; Péretié supplied him until 1882 with nearly two thirds of the collection⁶. A survey of early Cypriot archaeology describes the Cypriot objects Péretié had gathered as the nucleus of the De Clercq collection⁵. De Clercq wrote in the second volume of his catalogue that from 1859 Péretié was his agent and dug on his instructions and with his funds¹⁷. Hélène Cassimatis rejects this: she points out that Péretié had money from other sources and sold at public auctions in Paris, so that he cannot have worked for De Clercq alone, and she reads the arrangement as an agreement to provide antiquities¹.

Péretié died in April 1882. His son-in-law Edmond de Perthuis then drew up four signed lists, dated between 23 October 1882 and 8 October 1883, of antiquities bought for De Clercq, which Arthur de Ridder annotated; a fifth, undated list records pieces of Péretié's that were still at Beirut⁶.

Other sources of Cypriot pieces

De Clercq also bought in Paris. Olivier Masson found De Clercq's name among the buyers recorded in annotated copies of the catalogue of the Cesnola sale at the Hôtel Drouot on 25 and 26 March 1870, though no lots are named^7,8. Masson adds that some of the Dali finds of the consul Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi had "arrived in the De Clercq collection"⁹. A vase with a female head, reported from Idalion and numbered 563 in the catalogue, came from Barré, Piot and Rollin and stayed with De Clercq for a long time; it is now in Oxford as 1974.437⁸. A fragment of a Cypriot terracotta diadem belonged to Gréau from 1867, then to De Clercq, and reached Budapest through Paul Arndt in 1914¹².

De Ridder wrote five of the seven volumes of the Collection de Clercq, published by Leroux in Paris between 1888 and 1911, and had access to De Clercq's papers on how the collection was formed⁶. The fifth volume, Les antiquités chypriotes, is dated 1908 in the Cypriot bibliographies, though Cassimatis cites it as 1906^1,4,12.

The 1967 gift and the sale of the rest

After De Clercq's death the collection passed to his heirs, the Boisgelin family, and in 1967 they gave part of it to the Louvre and the Cabinet des Médailles; Henri de Boisgelin is named as the heir⁵. The Louvre was offered a free choice on condition that the pieces chosen were exhibited. The bulk of the collection was Greek and Near Eastern¹⁸. Of the Cypriot ensemble, described as of great quality, only a small part was taken, and the rest was dispersed through the house of Nicolas Koutoulakis².

Some of the pieces left behind can be followed. A limestone female head with a kekryphalos, reputed to come from Idalion and published by De Ridder in 1908, was not chosen in 1967, reappeared on the market and is now in the Musée d'Archéologie nationale⁴. Two Phoenician urns numbered 555 and 556 in the catalogue stayed with the Boisgelin heirs until 1968 and apparently then went on the market¹⁰. The Phoenician stele of Yehawmilk from Byblos, now in the Louvre as AO 22368, passed from De Clercq to Boisgelin and then to the museum²⁰. In 1992 the Antikensammlung in Berlin acquired material described as from the De Clercq collection in Paris¹³.