Wilhelm Froehner

The catalogue for the sale of Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Cypriot finds at the Hôtel Drouot in March 1870 was written by a man who never went to Cyprus, Wilhelm Froehner^1,2. He went on writing sale catalogues for the Paris trade for decades, and Cypriot material ran through several of them.

Froehner was born at Karlsruhe on 17 August 1834^10,11. He studied at Bonn, Freiburg and Göttingen, and as a student was commissioned by Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden to catalogue the antiquities at Karlsruhe, which appeared in 1860¹⁰. He reached Paris at the end of 1859, aged 25, and in 1862 became attaché and then assistant curator in the Louvre's antiquities department beside Adrien de Longpérier¹. He became a French citizen in 1866 and a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1868¹⁰.

The consul's crates

Froehner's first dealings with Cyprus came through the Louvre. On 29 July and 31 August 1868 his journal records meetings with Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi, the French consular officer at Larnaca, who promised to collect for the museum¹. Froehner cleared the first crates at the Bercy customs on 21 November 1868 and thought little of what he found; one crate was lost at sea¹. Olivier Masson has published eight letters to Froehner from the Colonna-Ceccaldi family, one of them from the consul's brother Georges. They show Froehner acting as intermediary between the consul and the Louvre, and the consul commissioning local men to dig on a smaller scale than Cesnola did². In July 1869 the Louvre's superintendent, Nieuwerkerke, offered 250 francs for terracottas and 1,500 francs for two statues from Trikomo; Tiburce accepted, and Masson identifies the statues as Louvre N 3497 and N 3498². Froehner's journal for 16 February 1869 notes that "the Ceccaldi collection is bought for 6000 francs", without naming the buyer¹.

The Cesnola sales

On 27 June 1868 Froehner met Henri Hoffmann, a German-born dealer on the Quai Voltaire, who at once gave him catalogues to write. Froehner regarded Hoffmann as his best friend and lived on his commissions until Hoffmann died on 11 September 1897¹. Hoffmann advised him not to sign the catalogues, and many are unsigned¹.

Froehner began the Cesnola catalogue on 18 December 1869 and finished it on 29 January 1870¹. The sale took place at the Drouot on 25 and 26 March. The preface describes Cesnola's firman and his dig at Dali with some fifty workmen, and regrets that no trained scholar had kept records of the tombs⁵. Six sepia photographs were bound into the catalogue. Buyers included the Louvre, Louis De Clercq, Hoffmann and Rollin². About forty pieces went to the museum at Marseille, and Froehner later noted the 1870 lot numbers for that museum's catalogue of 1897⁶.

In September 1870, after the fall of the Empire, Froehner lost his Louvre post. Hellmann, drawing on his journal, reports that he was held for a few days without a warrant after a denunciation by colleagues at the Louvre, an episode he dwelt on at length¹. A second Paris sale of Cesnola material, mentioned in Georges Colonna-Ceccaldi's letter of 26 July 1870, was stopped by the war, and Cesnola sent pieces to Sotheby's in London instead, for sales on 9 and 10 January and 1 and 2 May 1871². Froehner's journal for April 1871 says he wrote pages 1 to 17 of the May catalogue¹.

Cesnola's letters to Froehner have not survived at Weimar. Part of their content is known from excerpts that the Egyptologist Henri de Morgan copied on 28 August 1883 from a lost notebook of Froehner's dating from 1868 to 1870, among them passages on the Dali dig and the bull-headed statue from Golgoi². De Morgan wrote an unpublished manuscript against Cesnola in 1883, and on 22 November 1883 Froehner thanked de Morgan's father for it¹.

Writing for the Paris trade

In April 1873 he described the gold jewellery of G. Pieridès, and in January 1875 he bought engraved gems at Hoffmann's sale of Cypriot antiquities, the first Cypriot objects Hellmann can identify in his own collection¹. He wrote the catalogue of the Gréau terracottas, vases and marbles (written in September 1888, published in 1891)¹ and the 38-page catalogue of the Delestre-Hoffmann sale of March 1890, whose Cypriot consignment of 40 numbers included a lot the Louvre bought³. In 1893 he bought a Cypriot head at the Joly de Bammeville sale for Baron Barracco; Hellmann identifies it as Museo Barracco no. 67¹.

He also wrote the catalogue for the sale of the Marion-Arsinoe finds on 27 and 28 May 1887. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter had excavated them at Polis tis Chrysochou for Charles Christian, and Hoffmann held the sale. Froehner worked fast, left several thousand pieces out of the catalogue and bought two magic gems and two inscribed amphora handles for his own collection¹. Ohnefalsch-Richter's letters to him, which survive at Weimar and run to 1895, are mostly about money. On 24 August 1887 he sent Froehner 40 lottery tickets at 25 francs each with the words "help me!", and on 21 August 1895, writing from Spangenberg Castle, he asked Froehner to help sell his large Cypriot collection privately rather than at auction^1,7.

The Lambousa silver and his own cabinet

After Hoffmann's death Froehner bought mostly from dealers. Hellmann's reading of the journal gives the Paris history of the second Lambousa silver hoard, found in 1902 according to O. M. Dalton. On 20 July 1903 Paul Philipp, a Cairo dealer, told Froehner of a great Byzantine find in Cyprus; on 26 November 1903 the Paris dealer Sivadjian showed him part of the silver, and on 10 June 1904 the gold and silver "de Lapéthos"¹. J. Pierpont Morgan bought the hoard, in early 1906 as Hellmann reads the evidence, and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum¹. Froehner himself acquired a large bronze cross held by a hand, which he labelled "Chypre, tr. avec l'argenterie de la Coll. P. Morgan" and which is now in the Cabinet des Médailles as B.N. 762¹.

His Cypriot pieces went to the Cabinet des Médailles with the rest of his antiquities. Hellmann lists a gold ring, a thin silver leaf invoking Jesus of Nazareth bought in 1874, gems and inscribed stones, Byzantine bread stamps, bronze seals, two glass vessels, a terracotta tree and a gypsum plaque from Amathus with a long curse inscription¹. The lower part of a lead curse tablet from Kourion was also his; its upper half is in the British Museum⁴. The Cypriot coins he began buying in 1903, among them a worn gold coin of Evagoras I, were not part of the bequest and have not been traced¹. Some of his purchases are doubtful: Hellmann thinks a bronze mirror cover is probably a forgery, and Masson suspects that a pendant with Cypriot syllabic signs, bought in 1905, is a fake¹.

Froehner died in Paris on 22 May 1925¹⁰. He left his antiquities to the Cabinet des Médailles and his library of about 8,000 volumes, with his journal and letters, to Weimar, a division Hellmann explains by his double allegiance to Germany and France¹. The library reached Weimar in 1927, and part of the Weimar bequest was lost in the library fire of 2004¹⁰.