Joseph Eugène Paul Marguerite de la Charlonie

Paul Marguerite de la Charlonie (18 April 1844 to 26 October 1921) gathered some 1,700 Greek-world antiquities and is not known to have dug in Cyprus or visited it; the Cypriote part of them went to the museum at Laon. He was an engineer trained at the Arts et Manufactures who bought an alum factory in 1868 on leaving the École des Mines. He began collecting after an Aegean cruise in 1898, and followed the courses of Edmond Pottier at the École du Louvre. He later gave up business for a planned "Musée de l'Hellénisme antique et moderne" in Paris, to hold casts and photographs as well as originals¹.

Merrillees infers that the Cypriote pieces were bought in France, "and perhaps even in Cyprus", but cannot identify any Cyprus dealer among his suppliers. He names two Paris dealers, E. Triantaphyllos and Georges Manolakos, both of whom had bought Cypriote antiquities at the 1900 Boysset sale. La Charlonie's own list calls Triantaphyllos both an antiquities dealer and a "faussaire grec"¹. No Cyprus visit is recorded; Merrillees thinks a stop at Limassol on the way to Damascus and Jerusalem "possible, even likely", on the evidence of five prints in his papers, two of them stamped by a Limassol photographer¹.

His will, first dated 12 March 1902 with codicils to 24 April 1921, offered the collection to the Louvre, then to the Musée Guimet, then to named provincial museums. The Louvre and the Guimet both declined¹. A terracotta figurine had gone to the Louvre in 1903, and in 1931 three Greek sculptures went to the Louvre and three Mycenaean vases to Sèvres¹. Laon accepted the bequest in 1937. Its Cypriote holdings run from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period and include limestone sculptures, some said to come from Cnidos or Idalion, and terracottas making up about a third of the whole^2,4. One Laon chapter counts 126 Cypriote pieces from him, another about 96 he brought plus some ten in the older holdings⁴.