Marguerite Jeanne Verel

A small limestone Archaic head in the Drakopoulos Collection comes from the Paris collection that Marguerite Jeanne Verel formed with her husband, Victor Emile Gabriel Chevallier¹.

According to the owner of the Drakopoulos Collection, Verel was born in Paris on 5 December 1887 and died in Saulieu on 4 March 1962. She worked as a lecturer at the Louvre. On 27 December 1928 she married Chevallier in Paris, and the couple lived on the rue Jacob¹.

Chevallier, born in Frontenaud in 1889, taught at the Lycée Montaigne in Paris and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur on 21 March 1955. He died in Sèvres in 1969¹.

The couple assembled a collection of about 240 works. It held Egyptian pieces from the Naqada period to the Ptolemaic, Greek and Etruscan ceramics, a Mesopotamian tablet, Tanagra figures with their moulds, terracottas, alabasters, bronzes and marbles. One piece is listed as Cypriot and dated to the 11th century BC. Its centrepiece is a Roman marble ephebe in the Praxitellian style¹.

Chevallier photographed the best pieces. Each object carries an ink number that corresponds to an entry in the couple's handwritten inventory, and the photographs and the inventory remain with the family that now owns the collection. The inventory indicates that most of the collection was acquired in the first half of the 20th century and before 1969¹.

The couple had no heirs. The collection was entrusted to a family friend and has passed down within that friend's family, which has added to it from time to time¹.