Tinco Martinus Lycklama a Nijeholt

Tinco Martinus Lycklama a Nijeholt gave the town of Cannes the collection that now supplies part of its Cypriot holdings, although no record shows where in Cyprus any of it came from. He was born at Beetsterzwaag in Friesland on 9 July 1837 and died at Cannes on 7 December 1900³. He studied at Groningen from 1860 and then in Paris, and travelled in 1865-68 through Russia, Persia, Syria and Palestine, with excavations at Babylon¹. On the voyage home, which began on 2 September 1868, his ship called at Larnaca and he stayed on board¹. In 1869-70 he was based at Beirut, where he met Alphonse Durighello and dug near Sidon¹.

He opened a museum at Beetsterzwaag in May 1872 and closed it in September of that year. The collection then went to Cannes, and in 1877 he gave it to the town¹. His secretary, Ernest Massenot, made a list that gives no origins for the objects¹.

Decaudin, who catalogued the Cypriot material in 1993 (66 entries), found no vendors or findspots for it, and loans from the Louvre fill out the holdings. She notes that Luigi Palma di Cesnola had a de facto monopoly on Cypriot antiquities from 1868 and that Achille Peretie, a dragoman of the French consulate at Beirut, was known for supplying antiquities to collectors, but she states no transaction between him and Lycklama¹. Caubet writes that travellers such as the chevalier Lycklama obtained crateloads of objects from the peasants in Cyprus²; Decaudin's catalogue records no purchases on the island. In 1923 Theodore Reinach found the collection stored in disorder, and Joseph Billiet reordered it between 1928 and 1931¹.