John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819-1900) gave money to Luigi Palma di Cesnola and received Amathus antiquities from him. Olivier Masson dates Ruskin's gift of 1,000 pounds to about 1874 and says Cesnola thanked him with antiquities, among them a silver bowl and a shield from Amathus¹. In a letter of 27 April 1875 to Hitchcock, Cesnola referred to an Amathus sarcophagus found before he began digging for Mr Ruskin².

Anna Marangou reports an offer of 2,000. In her account Cesnola, whose New York contract was suspended after the financial crisis of 1873, had refused an offer of 2,000 to dig for Ruskin, regretted it to Samuel Birch, and asked whether the offer still stood³. Ruskin, then Slade Professor at Oxford, is also said to have given the Ashmolean Museum two sculpted grave stelai in 1873-74 that he had received from Cesnola for supporting the excavations⁴. Cesnola's Cyprus records that Ruskin visited a Golgoi priest statue on several days to draw its head while the collection was in London⁷.

Masson records further sculptures and heads from the same source reaching Oxford as gifts of R. G. Collingwood, dating them to 1938 in one place and 1933 in another¹. The silver bowl, dated 1875, entered the British Museum in 1931 as WA 123053, and the shield followed in 1972¹. J. L. Myres had already listed the bowl as at one time in the Ruskin Collection⁶.