Henri Hoffmann

Henri Hoffmann was the expert at the Hôtel Drouot for several of the sales that put Cypriot antiquities on the Paris market. He acted at the sale of Luigi Palma di Cesnola's 1868 finds on 25 and 26 March 1870, then bought at the London Cesnola sales of 1871, some of what he bought passing to the Louvre¹. In 1870 he took two heads from Pyla belonging to R. Hamilton Lang to London, where the British Museum bought one for fifty pounds⁶.

On 10 February 1873 he was expert for the sale of about a thousand Cypriot antiquities, 261 lots, from the collection of Demetrios Pierides⁵. In 1874 he bought Dr Tsepi's collection for 12,500 francs⁵, and in 1876 he sold a Cypriot male face to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Antikensammlung V 1275)¹⁰. In 1884 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, Watkins and Pierides sent him antiquities for auction¹².

With Maurice Delestre he held the sale of 27 and 28 May 1887, of finds from Arsinoe (Polis) excavated by Ohnefalsch-Richter and exported by Watkins and Charles Christian; the museums of Berlin, Copenhagen and Paris bought^5,11. Wilhelm Froehner wrote the catalogue of that sale according to Hellmann⁵, and the one for the Delestre and Hoffmann sale of 21 and 22 March 1890, which included a thousand pieces of Cypriot glass and pottery and from which the Louvre bought 42 objects³. Hoffmann was also expert for the "Envoi de Chypre" at Drouot on 15 and 16 June 1891, largely finds from clandestine digs at Amathus⁴.