John Holmes

In August 1870 John Holmes showed part of T. B. Sandwith's Cypriot pottery for sale in the picture gallery of the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, the first of many Yorkshire displays and lectures he gave on it¹.

Holmes was born in Sheffield on 8 March 1815 to humble parents, and was apprenticed at fourteen². He took drawing lessons at the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, built up a large business, and became an active co-operator and an admirer of Ruskin^1,2. He chaired the Institute's School of Art Committee, lectured there, and published A Sketch of the History of Leeds in 1873^1,3.

In the autumn of 1869 Holmes saw Cypriot pottery from the collection of Thomas Backhouse Sandwith in a shop window in Sheffield¹. A sketch of him printed in 1882 says that the study of "Cyprian" pottery brought him to the Sandwith family². The Leeds exhibition of August 1870 was mounted with Henry Sandwith and raised money for Sandwith's famine relief; Holmes then met Humphry Sandwith¹. Sales in Leeds were managed by Henry Denny, Holmes and Henry Sandwith, with prices set case by case¹. In September 1870 Holmes read Sandwith's paper on the pottery found at Dali to the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society¹.

In 1875 he sat on the Fine Art Committee of the Yorkshire Exhibition in Leeds, displayed the Sandwith collection there and wrote the Cypriot section of the catalogue. It divided the material into three periods, used loose terms for the vessels and apologised for the lack of a typology¹. Some pieces were sold at the exhibition, among them a Bichrome oenochoe bought by William Verity¹. Holmes also lent pieces to conversaziones at Huddersfield in 1874, Headingley in 1879 and the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society in 1881¹. After 1878 he lectured widely, on Cypriot antiquities as evidence for the Bible and on "Ancient Life by the light of Ancient Lamps"¹. In 1881 he read a paper at the British Association meeting in York on the Sandwith collection deposited in the York Museum, and was made an honorary member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society¹.

In May 1873 Holmes took a Cook's tour of the Near East. He bought a Middle Cypriot bronze axe at Dali, and with a guide visited a graveyard near Larnaca¹. The axe is now in Leeds Museums and Galleries as LEEDM.D.1964.0383¹. Anna Holly Reeve judges that Holmes made no original contribution to knowledge, collected on a small scale and mostly at second hand from Sandwith, but that he created local interest in Cypriot antiquities and a market for them¹.

In 1881 Holmes lost his wife and money, and intended to emigrate to New Zealand^1,2. He offered his collection to Leeds Corporation at half its expert valuation, for £250, as the nucleus of a free public museum. The council voted to buy it, 35 to 13, in January 1882¹. Disagreement over its display followed: the collection stood boarded up for two years, and Holmes objected to the location chosen in the Municipal Buildings in 1884¹.

The collection later passed to Leeds Art Gallery and was combined with the museum collections of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, with a list by Holmes accompanying the transfer¹. Objects from it now carry numbers in the LEEDM.D.1964 series, among them 0305, 0346 and 0371¹. Holmes died in 1894¹.