Hiram Hitchcock

Hiram Hitchcock was the friend in New York to whom Luigi Palma di Cesnola entrusted the sale of his Cypriot collections. Hitchcock was born in 1832, at Claremont according to Wikidata, though Marangou calls him a native of Hanover, New Hampshire^1,17. He was one of the original proprietors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Howe and Kent call him the last of the original members of the firm that opened it⁹. Marangou says his business was mining¹.

Marangou writes that Cesnola met him soon after reaching the United States, around 1858, and that the two were friends for life¹. About 200 letters from Cesnola to Hitchcock, dated 1863 to 1885, are at Dartmouth College¹. She describes Hitchcock as Cesnola's financial adviser, lender and confidant, who held full power of attorney, received and cleared the shipments and wrote the promotional articles¹. Hitchcock and his wife Mary visited Cesnola at Larnaca, in 1866 or 1867 depending on which passage of Marangou is followed¹. Cesnola dedicated Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples (1878) to him "in token of a friendship of many years"².

In 1872 Hitchcock spoke publicly about the finds. A speech of his on the Cypriot excavations drew an editorial in the New York Observer on 8 February¹. The Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Museum voted on 6 March to ask him for a lecture, and he gave the Museum's first lecture, on Cesnola's discoveries in Cyprus⁹. In July his article "The Explorations of Di Cesnola in Cyprus" appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine^10,11. Marangou describes it as written to impress the Museum's trustees¹. Masson and Hermary note that it gave Salamis as the origin of the bull's-head statue (Metropolitan Museum 74.51.2463), where Cesnola had stated Golgoi in 1868^5,12.

The same year the shipment from Cyprus reached him in New York, and Cesnola told him to keep one box at his own house in New Hampshire¹. When the Museum's president, John Taylor Johnston, passed on the trustees' doubts in a confidential letter, Hitchcock replied that he had no financial interest in the sale and offered to show Cesnola's correspondence with eminent Europeans¹. For the second collection he held instructions to sell at $60,000, with a minimum of $50,000 in gold¹. A telegram of November 1876 from the Museum to Cesnola reports an offer that "Hitchcock considered acceptable"¹. In September 1877 Cesnola, in agreement with the Museum's president, asked him to prepare a summary article on the discoveries¹. Marangou's own judgement is that without Hitchcock the Museum would probably not have bought either collection, nor appointed Cesnola¹.

Cesnola gave Hitchcock a series of antiquities, dated to about 1871 by Masson and to about 1872 by the Hood Museum, which Hitchcock kept at Hanover^3,15. Dartmouth College had given him an honorary A.M. in 1872 and he served as a college trustee from 1878 to 1892¹³. He was elected a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum in 1885, a date the Museum's lamp catalogue gives as 1895, and became its Treasurer in 1892^9,16. Howe and Kent say he helped in effecting the purchase of the Cypriote antiquities⁹.

His first wife died in 1887, and Marangou reports that he then asked Cesnola's second daughter, Louise, to marry him, after which Cesnola stopped mentioning him in the letters¹. In 1900 he married Emily Howe of Hanover⁹. He died at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on 30 December 1900^9,17. Emily Howe Hitchcock died in January 1912 and left Dartmouth College the di Cesnola collection of Cypriot antiquities, many of them duplicates of Metropolitan Museum pieces¹³.