Henry Perigal Borrell

Henry Perigal Borrell sold the Duke of Devonshire the bronze head of Apollo from Tamassos, now in the British Museum, though he is not known ever to have visited Cyprus. He was born in 1795, was at Smyrna from 1818 and worked there as a merchant, dealer and numismatist until his death in 1851; Merrillees describes him as an expatriate Englishman¹. In the early 1830s he sold several thousand coins to the British Museum, a few of them struck on Cyprus, and in 1836 he published in Paris a Notice sur quelques medailles grecques des rois de Chypre^1,2.

The statue from which the head came was found at Tamassos in 1836. According to Ludwig Ross, villagers sold the bronze as scrap, and the head reached a Herr Vondiziano at Larnaca, who sold it to Borrell at Smyrna for 1,800 piastres³. Merrillees names three possible sellers, Antonio Vondiziano, his brother Andreas, and Andreas's son Petros Pavlos, and thinks Antonio the most likely¹. On 25 March 1839 the Duke, newly arrived at Smyrna, was taken to Borrell by the vice-consul John Henry Charnaud. Borrell's receipt lists seven objects bought that March, for which the Duke's diary records £15, and gives the head's origin as the "ruins of Salamis"¹. The head was the only Cypriot piece among them.

After Borrell's death his collection was sold in London. At the second sale, in 1852, the British Museum bought through Henry Cureton an alphabetic Greek inscription from New Paphos². His daughter Sophia married Stephen Joly in 1856, and their son Ernest Thomas Charles Joly (1859-1932) collected Cypriot antiquities whose whereabouts are not known¹.