James Bomford

The Proto-White Painted figure of a horse and rider that Hector Catling published in 1974 is known as the Bomford Horse-and-Rider, after the British collector James Bomford⁶. Little is recorded of the man himself: his dates of birth and death and his occupation are not known.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford lists two gifts from him, an alabaster pyxis (AN1968.90), "Presented by Mr James Bomford, 1968", and a Cypro-Archaic head (AN1971.414), presented in 1971^1,2. Thomas Kiely names him as the source of the most notable gifts and bequests to the museum's Cypriot collection in the years of Catling's keepership, which ended in 1971³. Catling wrote two articles on pieces from the "Bomford Collection": a bronze statuette in Alasia I (1971) and the horse-and-rider in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1974^5,6. Morris places the horse-and-rider in the Ashmolean⁴.

Desmond Morris dedicated The Art of Ancient Cyprus (1985) "to the late James Bomford whose generosity and wisdom first led me into the world of the visual arts", so Bomford had died by then. Morris also owned a jug that had belonged to the Bomford Collection⁴.