Veronica Tatton-Brown

Her first article, published in 1969 in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus when she was still called Veronica Wilson, dealt with the relief of Aristila of Salamis found at Marion²¹. A year later the same journal printed her study of the warrior relief from Lysi²¹. Her Oxford thesis, supervised by John Boardman, treated the sarcophagi of Amathus and Golgoi and led her early to funerary sculpture, which Hermary calls a practically unknown subject at the time²¹. She defended it in December 1972 as The Cesnola Sarcophagi: Studies in Cypriot Iconography and Sculpture, and it was never published²¹.

The thesis led her to the image of Bes in Cyprus, the subject of a 1975 article in Levant that Hermary judges still fundamental²¹. Her 1986 paper "Gravestones" proposed, in Hermary's words, the first typology of these monuments, the only one available until Elena Pogiatzi's thesis appeared in 2003²¹. Franz Georg Maier, director of the German-Swiss mission, entrusted her with the Archaic sculptures found in the Persian siege ramp at Palaepaphos-Kouklia²¹. Hermary writes that her other work and then health problems kept her from finishing that publication, which Danielle Leibundgut Wieland was to complete²¹.

In 1982 she discussed a limestone head said to come from Rantidi, dating it to the first decade of the 5th century BC²⁶. Stephan G. Schmid and Sophie G. Horacek note that doubts about its origin grew while she was preparing her contribution, so the head was left out of the Rantidi publication, and that most of her provenanced comparisons came from Idalion²⁶. Hermary and Joan R. Mertens record that she contested reading the Golgoi multi-bodied warriors as the triple Geryon, preferring "a multicorporate warrior known to the Easterner although anonymous to us"²⁷. Vassos Karageorghis took the other view in 2000, identifying such a figure as Geryon while citing her work²⁸.

Tatton-Brown joined the museum to work on the catalogue of ancient glass with Donald Harden as well as on the Cypriot collections^23,29. She wrote the section on rod-formed glass pendants and beads of the 1st millennium BC in Harden's 1981 catalogue, and in 1984 published the glass from the British Mission's excavations at Carthage³⁰. The 1979-80 exhibition Cyprus BC was accompanied by a popular book that Thomas Kiely says was edited by Brian Cook, with her Iron Age chapter²⁹. Hermary places her 1979 chapter "Iron Age Cyprus" in Cook's Cypriote Art in the British Museum, while a Yale record cites "Tatton-Brown et al., Cyprus BC: 7000 Years of History"^21,31.

In 1987 she curated the first A. G. Leventis Foundation Gallery of Ancient Cyprus, opened by the Duke of Gloucester, and wrote for it the book Ancient Cyprus, revised in 1997^23,32. She edited the papers of the Seventh British Museum Colloquium of April 1988, including her own notes on matters arising from preparing the gallery²¹. Her chapter on Cyprus under the Ptolemies appeared in Sir David Hunt's Footprints in Cyprus in 1990³³.

Tatton-Brown wrote that the work of Olivier Masson inspired her to collect all the British Museum archives concerning Cyprus³. She organised a London colloquium in his memory in December 1998 and published her paper on the museum's original manuscripts and correspondence on excavations in Cyprus in its proceedings in 2001²¹. In 2000 she matched the sculpture and terracottas from the museum's Enkomi tombs, as described in the notebook of A. H. Smith and H. B. Walters, to the department's records of registration³⁴. In 2003 she transcribed that notebook in full⁴. Her 2002 paper followed Robert Hamilton Lang's exploration of the so-called Temple of Apollo at Idalion in 1868³⁵.

She had just left her post at the museum in December 2004, when Robert Merrillees proposed dedicating volume 35 of the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes to her Cypriot work²¹. Hermary praised there the rare professional generosity of her welcome to every researcher working on Cyprus²¹. Derek B. Counts called her a crucial link for more than 30 years between the museum's Cypriot collections and the scholars and students who studied them². Kiely edited a volume of eight essays in her honour, with a preface by J. Lesley Fitton³⁶. She died in March 2012; Wikidata alone gives the day as 9 March^2,25. The museum bought a limestone figurine of a dog catching a hare, registration number 2012,5009.1, in her memory³⁷.