William Cowper Prime

William Cowper Prime (1825-1905) was one of the Metropolitan Museum trustees who investigated, and cleared, the Cypriot collection of his friend Luigi Palma di Cesnola. He was a New York lawyer and editor who also wrote on pottery, coins and the Holy Land, and he was the museum's vice-president in 1874³. In 1870, hearing that he was digging at Jerusalem, Cesnola wrote that Prime should come to Cyprus; Cesnola planned to send vases as small presents to "Mr. Prime and others" and took two of Prime's articles as models for his own writing¹. Marangou calls Prime a good friend who worked to get Cesnola his directorship¹.

In October 1880 Cesnola asked the trustees to investigate the charges made by Georges Feuardent about restorations of the stone sculptures. Prime sat on the committee with Barnard, Hitchcock, Daly and Ward. On 5 January 1881 Cesnola declared that he had made no stone restoration, and the committee found that "each and all of the charges are without foundation"^7,9. The Art Amateur, which took Feuardent's side, called it "Mr. Prime's board of inquiry" and a "mock inquiry"⁷. The reporter Lawrence Kane testified that the committee met at Prime's house in East 23rd Street, where Cesnola read a reply⁶.

At the Feuardent-Cesnola trial of January 1884, in the magazine's report, Dickson B. Alley said that Prime and Cesnola managed the inquiry to suit themselves and that Prime once brushed water over the hand and patera of a priest statue. George C. Cox said that Prime once took President Barnard to a statue and swore on his honour that it was as taken from the earth, the day after Cox had seen it in the repair room with its head off⁸. These were statements by the plaintiff's side; Prime was not a party to the suit. After the trial he wrote to Cesnola that public service in this country does not reward us¹. He gave his ceramic collection to Princeton and in 1884 became its first professor of art history³. He died in February 1905³.