Henry Wellcome

Almost a thousand Cypriot antiquities, most without a findspot, were part of the collection Sir Henry Wellcome assembled for a museum of the history of medicine. Born in 1853, he settled in England in 1880, made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, was naturalised in 1910 and knighted in 1932; from 1900 he collected on a huge scale, and at his death in 1936 he left over 1,500,000 items¹. Kiely describes the Cypriot holdings as bought on the market, many of them from Rupert Gunnis, with no provenance².

On 30 August 1933 Gunnis sold Wellcome a collection of Cypriot antiquities. Symons notes that the Wellcome documentation is poor and no details of the sale survive¹. Stanley-Price writes that Gunnis sold many antiquities either at auction or directly to Wellcome, and that Sotheby's sold Gunnis property on 12 December 1933⁴. Jim Stewart told Wace that the Wellcome Museum had bought some of Gunnis's collection⁶. Symons identified about 200 pieces that came from Gunnis¹.

The Cypriot material was dispersed after Wellcome's death. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery received the bulk of it, in 1980 according to Kiely; Symons gives 1981 for the Trustees' decision to dispose of surplus non-medical material^1,2. Smaller groups went to the Ashmolean, Bristol City Museum, the Hunterian, the Royal Scottish Museum, Manchester Museum and the National Museum on Merseyside, and base-ring juglets went to the Science Museum for the Wellcome Museum of the History of Medicine¹. The Trustees also gave archaeological material to the British Museum in 1964, 1975 and 1982³.