Frances Louisa Stott

Frances Louisa Stott (1847-1919) was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, into a textile-manufacturing family; her brother became a wealthy engineer, and she never married or needed to work¹. She had a long relationship with Charles Louis Hoelen of London, a married man. His wife's divorce petition of 1888 alleged that from 1875 he had committed adultery with Stott on journeys to the Continent, Palestine (1879), America, Biarritz (1880) and Belgium (1887); Alexandra Reeve notes that the relationship may have been platonic¹. Reeve infers that Stott's antiquities were gathered on these journeys. Her will lists "curios, old pottery, scaraboes", an Egyptian stone set as a brooch, and a cylinder seal that she said her "late friend" Charles Louis Hoelen had given her¹.

After Hoelen died in 1892, Stott tried to memorialise him. In 1915 she arranged for two Egyptian glass bottles to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum under his name, and her will of 18 August 1913 asked the British Museum to accept her antiquities as his gift. The British Museum has no record of the bequest¹.

The objects went to Leeds instead. In 1920 a Mrs M. Smith, probably Stott's niece Martha Smith, gave them to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The society's report listed Greek lekythoi, vases, a cup, a skyphos, Egyptian bronze figures and "an Aryballos from Cyprus"¹. Reeve reads the group as a souvenir collection and records no Cypriot findspot, dealer or purchase for the aryballos¹. It is now catalogued as Corinthian, with a warrior frieze (LEEDM.D.1967.1272)¹.