Robert Forrer

Robert Forrer, born at Meilen in Switzerland on 9 January 1866, was a Strasbourg archaeologist who obtained Cypriot antiquities through Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and later passed them to German museums^1,2. He was active in Strasbourg from 1888 and directed its museum of prehistoric, Roman and Merovingian antiquities from 1909 to 1945².

Forrer's Cypriot purchases came at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Ohnefalsch-Richter he acquired vessels and terracottas, and above all metal objects: weapons, tools and jewellery. He used pieces from this material as illustrations in his Reallexikon der prähistorischen, klassischen und frühchristlichen Alterthümer (1907) and Urgeschichte des Europäers (1908)¹. Annegret Recke counts him among the private buyers of Ohnefalsch-Richter's material, together with Julius Naue, Heinrich Frauberger and Valentin Weisbach¹.

When Forrer turned to other scientific questions, he disposed of the Cypriot parts of his collections¹. The Ruhrland-Museum in Essen (now the Ruhr Museum) received its Cypriot holdings from him in 1913: one sculpture, twelve ceramics, four terracottas, 45 metal objects, a bone handle and a stone tool, some of them labelled as coming from Larnaca¹. The Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz took in Forrer material in 1917, among it 195 ceramics and 21 metal objects drawn from several sources¹. The Martin-von-Wagner-Museum in Würzburg holds 17 ceramics, 23 fragments and ten terracottas from his collection, undated in Recke's list¹. His eldest daughter Odile married the archaeologist Claude F.-A. Schaeffer³. Forrer died at Strasbourg on 9 April 1947².