Gaston Louis Feuardent

Gaston L. Feuardent had helped to sell Luigi Palma di Cesnola's first Cypriot collection in London in 1872, and in August 1880 he published the charge that the sculptures from that collection, by then in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, had been deceptively altered and restored^3,10. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the museum's director, answered with a denial, an inquiry by the museum's trustees and, from 1883, a libel trial in which Feuardent was the plaintiff.

Rollin and Feuardent

Feuardent was born at or near Cherbourg in 1843, the son of the Paris numismatist and dealer Félix Feuardent^4,17. Félix was the partner and later son-in-law of C. Rollin, and the business traded as Rollin et Feuardent⁴. According to the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society's obituary, Gaston joined the business and at twenty-five opened a London branch, where he became a regular at the British Museum; Masson gives its address as 61 Great Russell Street^5,17. Masson reads Cesnola's complaint of April 1870 about a Paris dealer who paid 800 francs for a lot and resold two heads from it for 1,100 as aimed at the father⁴.

In the autumn of 1872 about 6,000 of Cesnola's antiquities reached London and Cesnola asked the branch to promote and sell them, against the advice of Colonna Ceccaldi². Masson names Gaston as the young representative who organised the exhibition that followed; among the visitors were J. S. Morgan and the Metropolitan Museum trustee William T. Blodgett, and Masson credits them with prompting the American purchase at the end of that year³. The Society's obituary says that Feuardent acted as Cesnola's agent in selling the collection to the Museum, and that he went to New York in 1876 to open a branch; Masson puts the move in 1879^5,17.

He joined the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society in January 1877, read papers to it in 1878 and 1881, and was its Curator of Archaeology from 1885 to 1888¹⁷.

"Tampering with Antiquities"

Feuardent's article in The Art Amateur of August 1880 carried that title and charged that deceptive alterations and restorations had seriously impaired the archaeological value of objects in the Cesnola collection, and a second article followed in October^15,16. Cesnola called the charges "maliciously made and absolutely without foundation in fact" and asked the trustees to investigate; a committee of F. A. P. Barnard, Roswell D. Hitchcock, Charles P. Daly, J. Q. A. Ward and William C. Prime reported that each of the charges was without foundation. Feuardent, the same report says, believed the committee had not given him a fair hearing and extended his charges in a series of public statements¹⁶. In 1881 he invited readers to compare an engraving of the Golgoi sarcophagus in the Revue Archéologique of 1875 with the object in the Museum, and quoted a sworn statement by the Museum's photographer, George C. Cox, that parts of its sculptured side were new¹³. In 1882 he published Clarence Cook's pamphlet Transformations and Migrations of Certain Statues in the Cesnola Collection⁶.

Marangou reports that Cesnola replied that Feuardent was a dealer whose offers the Museum had refused, and Feuardent pointed to the sums the Museum had paid Cesnola². Cesnola also told his assistant Alexander D. Savage that Feuardent had extorted $13,000 through Morgan; Feuardent denied it².

The libel suit

Feuardent sued Cesnola for libel in the Superior Court in May 1881; the case was moved to the United States Circuit Court because Feuardent was an alien, and the trial opened on 31 October 1883 before Judge Nathaniel Shipman^15,16. Feuardent claimed $25,000. F. C. Bangs was his counsel; Joseph H. Choate and Mr. Stickney appeared for Cesnola^2,15. In The Art Amateur's report, Henry G. Hutchins, a former assistant superintendent of the Museum, testified that the repairer Feodor Gehlen, working in the Museum's basement under Cesnola's direction, had rebuilt broken statues with plaster, stone fragments and a tinted wash¹⁵. Cesnola's side set out to prove Feuardent incompetent and dishonest, and accused him of overcharging for cartage in London and of making no proper effort to sell the collection¹⁶.

The accounts of the verdict differ. Marangou describes it as a complete vindication of Cesnola, with the jury rejecting all of Feuardent's accusations². The Art Amateur, which had published Feuardent's charges, reported that the jury found for Cesnola on two of the three counts put to it and could not agree on the third, the one concerning the London cartage and agency¹⁶. The magazine added that the judge had left aside the archaeological questions and charged the jury only on libel, and it reprinted an editorial from The Sun which said that Cesnola's own testimony admitted that about a third of the statues had had pieces detached and stuck on again¹⁶. On 1 March 1884 the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society adopted resolutions in Feuardent's support^2,11.

After the trial

According to Marangou, Cesnola learned in the mid-1880s that Feuardent was corresponding with Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and writing from New York to Cypriots including Koutsocheris, Vondiziano and D. Pierides². A Base Ring bird-face figurine from Alambra that had passed through his hands went to Paul Arndt and was bought for the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1914⁹. He died in New York on 12 June 1893, and a requiem mass was held at the Church of St Vincent de Paul¹⁷.