John Ringling

John Ringling took 2,300 objects from the Cesnola collection when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold part of it in New York in 1928. Of the 3,500 items in the original collection, about 2,900 were auctioned, and on 31 March Ringling took 2,300 of them for $56,000¹. Oscar Masson, who consulted an annotated copy of the two sale catalogues (965 lots, with a preface by R. W. de Forest), found Ringling the most frequent buyer. His lots included Pyla statuettes that had passed from R. H. Lang through Cesnola, thirteen temple boys and many vases; F. W. Collins bought five temple boys at the same sale, and these went to Roanoke, Virginia².

Ringling, born in 1866², was a circus owner and real-estate developer. The museum he established in Sarasota in 1927 opened in 1932, and it passed to the State of Florida in 1946, ten years after his death¹. When Vassos Karageorghis wrote about the collection in 1998, he found the Cypriot material mostly packed in crates³. A 1983 exhibition, a further exhibition in 1997-98 and an inventory followed¹.