James Alfred Brew

James Alfred Brew lent two multi-headed Red Polished plank figures to the Ashmolean Museum in 1972, and they stayed in its Cyprus gallery until the loan was closed in 2025¹. He was born in Douglas on the Isle of Man on 7 July 1923 and died in London on 9 March 2008¹. He studied at Douglas High School, the Manchester College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, served in the North Staffordshire Regiment from 1942 to 1946, and in 1949 became art master at St Joseph's, Blackheath, where he stayed for eleven years¹.

From 1960 to 1970 he taught at British services schools, with postings in Cyprus and Hong Kong¹. In Cyprus he bought antiquities from villagers and dealers, most of them medieval sgraffito bowls¹. One lamp in his collection is inscribed on the base "Paphos 1965, J.A. Brew"¹. After his overseas years he was Head of Art at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, from 1973 until he retired in 1988, and he also designed theatrical sets and traced Manx family trees¹.

On 29 August 1972 Brew sent the Ashmolean a typed list of about 120 numbered pieces, grouped by place as Elea, Paphos and "no provenance"¹. The Keeper of Antiquities, R. W. Hamilton, set the terms in writing: an indefinite, revocable loan, with Brew keeping ownership and the museum free to publish¹. The two plank figures, numbers 114 and 115 on his list, were entered as having no provenance. They are of Red Polished III ware, one with two necks and one with three¹. Nothing records where in Cyprus they were found¹. Both were published from the Ashmolean's 1975 handbook to Karageorghis's corpus of 1991¹.

In a letter to Ann Brown of 17 February 1973 he corrected the find-place of some medieval bowls to a village reached by driving out from Nicosia toward Morphou. He wrote that the owner, whom he thought to be the village mukhtar, "used to sell off some of the pots"¹. He also named others worth visiting: a man called Loizides at Morphou, the Pierides collection in Larnaca, a collector reached through the Limassol Club, a dealer in the main square of walled Nicosia and the mukhtar of Episkopi¹.

In 2004, aged eighty, Brew asked for part of the collection back. He chose about twenty vessels, mostly medieval bowls, to take back; neither plank was among them¹. Brew died in 2008. His estate sold a Cypriot bichrome platter at Bonhams in London on 29 April 2009 as the property of "the late Mr J.A. Brew, 1923-2008", with the note that the collection was formed mainly in the 1960s¹. The Ashmolean loan ended on 30 September 2025, and the two plank figures passed to the Drakopoulos Collection¹.