Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton, the painter, was one of the private donors behind British excavation in Cyprus in the early 1880s. He is not known to have visited the island or to have acquired any Cypriot objects; his collections were sold at Christie's in 1896¹.

Leighton met Max Ohnefalsch-Richter at Capri in 1874, and Ohnefalsch-Richter later persuaded him to help Charles Newton fund Cyprus excavations¹. Newton had to rely on private individuals, among them the artist and Museum Trustee Leighton; the digs of 1880 to 1883 were carried out by Ohnefalsch-Richter³. A large and loosely documented group of Cypriot objects registered by the Museum in 1884, mostly Bronze Age material from Yeri and Alambra, came from excavations paid for by private individuals, "especially the painter Frederick (later Lord) Leighton"². In 1882 he took a sample of glazed terracotta sent by Reinach, which came from Smyrna and not from Cyprus, for analysis by A. H. Church¹.

Leighton was a founding member of the Cyprus Exploration Fund in 1887¹. In 1888 Ohnefalsch-Richter proposed joint London and Berlin work at Dali, and the only reply from London was one from Leighton that conveyed a refusal⁴. He died on 25 January 1896 in London⁵.