On June 1st, the Institut National du Patrimoine (INP) in Tunisia posted their concerns on their Facebook page about an upcoming auction at Coutau-Bégarie auction house in Paris, scheduled for the 11th of June.  Up for sale was a grouping of Tunisian personal effects, made up mostly of Qur’ans, manuscripts, books of poetry, tunisian djebba, (the country's traditional attire for men), and personal correspondence dating from the reign of the Beys.  The items up for sale were modestly priced, starting at €120 and going upwards to €1500.

The objects were once the personal property of an influential Tunisian dignitary Mohamed Habib Djellouli, (arabic: محمد الحبيب الجلولي).  Born into a patrician family belonging to the Tunisian aristocracy, Djellouli had served as the Caïd-Gouverneur of Kairouan, Nabeul and Béja and later as the Minister of the Pen and Minister of Justice of Bey.   The Beys he ruled Tunisia from 1613 until 1957, when the modern Tunisian Republic was formed. Djellouli's personal effects, accumulated over years, were passed down to his heirs after his death in 1957, the same year that the monarchy was abolished and the beylical office terminated. 

The objects from his private collection drew concerns from the INP as there was no record of the pieces having left the territory of the Republic of Tunisia, and it appears that the transfer was done without the knowledge of the country's Ministry of Cultural Affairs.  It is their job to determine if movable properties fall within the parameters of the cultural heritage code, which explicitly prohibits the export of movable cultural property of national or international historic value. 

The country's Ministry of Cultural Affairs was established in Tunisia in 1961 to implement cultural policy on behalf of the country.  The Institut National du Patrimoine (INP) operates alongside the ministry and oversees twenty archaeological and ethnological museums throughout the Republic.  It was the INP who first sounded the alarm to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Tunisia regarding their concerns about the sale in Paris.  

Tunisia's current law for the archaeological, historical and traditional arts patrimony was enacted in 1994 and amended in 2011.  Known as Decree-law n° 2011-43 and dated 25 May 2011, this updated law increases the penalties for infractions related to moveable heritage.  Under the current national law, article 57, the export of movable property is prohibited though temporary export of movable cultural property is possible, subject to authorization from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs.  

Yesterday Ghazi Gherardi, the ambassador and permanent representative of Tunisia to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation  - UNESCO announced that all 114 objects related to the "Collection of a Dignitary of the Beylical Court" had been withdrawn from the sale with the auction house sending a communiqué containing a pledge to cease the sale procedures until the competent arbitral authority considers the matter.

And while that withdrawal is a small victory for Tunis, one has to question, for the umpteenth time, what type of due diligence, if any, was performed by Coutau-Bégarie before agreeing to accept these items for the auction, what if any checks occurred at the EU border when these objects arrived on Europe's shore, and what documentation was provided, if any at all, to Coutau-Bégarie by the individuals selling the family property. 

Stands to reason that if an auction house has time to develop length object descriptions for one hundred and fourteen items, photograph them, and then design a sales catalog to highlight them, uploading the PDF to their website, they might also have the time to ring up the authorities in Tunisia to ask about the legitimacy of the objects being consigned.  

I found it in an attic...never a basement, never on the wall, never in granny's bedroom.  The number of forgotten masterpieces purportedly found under the rooftops of houses, many of them French for some reason, sometime can seem too good to be true.  Not to mention an almost tritely predictable location.   

I've been in my parents attics lots of times but all I ever find is old Christmas ornaments, not priceless, formally unknown masterpieces. 

In 2010 family members found a Chinese 18th Century Qianlong porcelain Fish Vase, clearing out the attic of their uncle/brother's modest home in Pinner, a town in the Borough of Harrow, in northwest London shortly after he recently died.  The 18th century vase later sold at Bainbridges auction for a mind boggling £53.1 million.  

In 2013, after considerable doubt, then Van Gogh museum director Axel Rüger announced that the 1988 "Sunset at Montmajour" which had been “rediscovered” after sitting in a Norwegian attic,  was authentic.

In 2013 a tiny figurine, made by Faberge, depicting a known personal bodyguard to the family of Russian Czar Nicholas II was found in an upstate New York attic when relatives cleaned out the space following the death of a relative.  The jaunty soldier sold for $5.2 million.  

In 2015,  a Scotsman, Dominic Currie told the world he was cleaning out old belongings that once belonged to his deceased mother, and purportedly found a work by the Cubist artist Pablo Picasso rolled up in an old suitcase he had stored in his attic in 2000, apparently too distraught to go through her things at the time of his mum's passing.  The artwork later turned out to be a hoax, though Currie claims that his ruse was simply a piece of performance art, done to raise awareness of the plight of struggling artists like himself.

In April of 2016, in still yet another French attic, near Toulouse, apparently produced a rare painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.  This artwork depicts the violent biblical scene of "Judith Beheading Holofernes" which, if it is to be believed, dates back to around 1600.  It will go under the hammer in Toulouse on June 27 this year and could fetch as much as $171 million.

In 2018 a second set of siblings cleaning out their parents attic in France found dozens of pieces of Chinoiserie.  One of them was an Imperial 18th-century ‘Yangcai’ Famille-Rose porcelain vase, found in a shoebox, created during the reign of Qianlong, the fourth emperor in the Qing dynasty.  It sold for 16.2 million euros via Sotheby's later that same year. 

Perhaps it's time to tidy up those dusty attic corners.

By:  Lynda Albertson

In March 2015, the Iraqi government formally announced that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL had purposefully destroyed much of the Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II as part of their iconoclastic program of obliterating preislamic cultural heritage monuments in their original archaeological contexts.  But despite the worldwide outrage at the time of this tragedy, most of the general public had already forgotten about the losses faced by the Iraqi people by the time the Virginia Theological Seminary publicly announced, on April 13, 2018, that it would be selling one of their own objects from Nimrud.  On that date, the trustees announced that for various reasons, they had decided to sell their own seven-foot carved gypsum alabaster panel from the now-destroyed palace, a relief known as "The Bearded Winged Apukalu." It's auction is set to occur at Christie’s Antiquities Sale in New York on the 31st of October.

Until very recently, the press hardly noticed the upcoming sale.  This despite the fact that art historian Kiersten Neumann drew attention to the upcoming event via Twitter on May 22, 2018.   The auction of this rare piece of history was also of much talk by Assyriologists and museum professionals around the world.

Virginia Theological Seminary's Assyrian relief from #Nimrud on display at Christie’s New York in advance of a planned sale in October. https://t.co/YD29eGs4o8 pic.twitter.com/x6oThAFh71

— Kiersten Neumann (@KNpazuzu) May 22, 2018

From ARCA's calculations there are at least 76 known public collections and 6 private collections which contain material culture from the Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II.  

The last Assyrian relief to appear on the legitimate ancient art market sold to Noriyoshi Horiuchi after a bidding war between the Japanese antiquities dealer and an Italian phone bidder in 1994.  At that time, the relief sold for an eye-popping 7.7 million British pounds, a price 10 times what the auctioneers at Christie's had estimated. 

The Horiuchi-purchased bas-relief, like the one at the VTS, was excavated in the mid-19th century in what is now Iraq by British archeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard.  It was then given over to Sir John Guest, then owner of Canford Manor, who helped to pay for bringing the finds from Nimrud back to Britain.  That piece of the palace is now on display at the Miho Museum in Kyoto, Japan.

The public however only seems to have taken notice in the VTS relief months after the Seminary made its announcement and only after the high dollar estimate the object is likely to bring started arousing interest in the major news outlets.

Like with the relief purchased by Horiuchi, the VTS relief was also excavated sometime around 1845 by Sir Austen Henry Layard.   Layard in turn is reported to have sold the object to Dr. Henri Byron Haskell, a medical missionary who worked in the 1850's in Mosul.  Haskell was interested in objects from the palace as proof of biblical history, for Nimrud is known as the ancient site of Calah and is mentioned in Genesis 10:11.  Haskell in turn, passed them on to his friend Joseph Packard, then professor and later Dean at Virginia Theological Seminary and the relief was shipped to the United States where it has been housed at the Virginia Theological Seminary since 1860.

Screen Capture: Facebook Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage

Despite being part of the VTS collection for more than 150 years, a recent call for help and appeal from the State Board for Antiquities and Heritage has been made by Dr. Qais Hussein Rashid, Deputy Minister of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities and President of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage asking for law enforcement intervention asking for help in stopping the sale.  Unfortunately, the evidence is quite strong that the relief was legally excavated and exported in the nineteenth century, which makes preventing the sale highly unlikely.

The three Assyrian reliefs are purported to have reached America in 1859 where their transfer to the Virginia Theological Seminary appears to have been well established.  Packard, citing Rev. J. S. Lindsay, writes that the three slabs, were so valuable that the Smithsonian Institution, on failing to purchase them, had plaster casts made of them (Packard, citing Rev. J.S. Lindsay, 1902, 305).  The relief is also documented in other academic articles including the 1976 article by Ross, J.F. "The Assyrian reliefs at Virginia Seminary", part of the Virginia Seminary Journal 28(1) pages 4-10.

The strength of the Iraqi's claim for the restitution of its heritage in this instance would likely hinge on the applicability of New York penal law, i.e. that a thief can never acquire good title.  To do so, the courts would have to prove that the Virginia Theological Seminary, was is possession of stolen property.  If that were to be the case, the New York District Attorney's office could then seize the property as evidence and then move to release the stolen property under PL §450.10(2)'s mandate that "unless extended by a court order...property shall be released...after satisfactory proof of such person's entitlement of the possession thereof." But this might be difficult, if not impossible for the Iraqi authorities to substantiate.

Despite the somewhat contentious nature of Layard’s early explorations at Nimrud, which were at first clandestine, the intervention of the British government, to gain official support for the archaeologist's excavations from the Ottoman Turkish authorities is well documented.

On 5 May 1846, the Grand Vizier of the Turkish Empire sent a letter to the Pasha of Mosul, based upon the intercession of Stratford Canning, the Viscount Stratford, who partially funded Lanyard’s explorations.  A diplomat who represented Great Britain at the Ottoman court for almost 20 years, Canning spent most of his career as ambassador in Constantinople and was influential in exerting a strong influence on Turkish policy in support of the sultan’s resistance to Russia’s attempts to increase its influence over Ottoman affairs which eventually would lead to the outbreak of the Crimean War.  Through Canning's assistance,  the Brits were able to obtain permission for Layard's excavation.

The vizier's letter reads as follows: 

There are, as your Excellency knows, in the vicinity of Mosul quantities of stones and ancient remains. An English gentleman has come to these parts to look for such stones, and has found on the banks of the Tigris, in certain uninhabited places, ancient stones on which there are pictures and inscriptions. The British Ambassador has asked that no obstacles shall be put in the way of the above-mentioned gentleman taking the stones which may be useful to him, including those which he may discover by excavations … nor of his embarking them for transport to England.

The sincere friendship which firmly exists between the two governments makes it desirable that such demands be accepted. Therefore no obstacle should be put in the way of his taking the stones which … are present in desert places, and are not being utilised, or of his undertaking excavations in uninhabited places where this can be done without inconvenience to anyone; or of his taking such stones as he may wish amongst those which he has been able to discover.

--H.W.F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria, Sidgwick and Jackson , 1984, page 305.

In order to succeed in stopping the sale in New York, Iraq as a claimant would have to first prove that they have standing to bring such a cultural claim in a US court.  If the VTS has documentation proving that Layard passed their relief on to Dr. Henri Byron Haskell with the permission of the authorities in power at that time, as the provenance in the auction seems to indicate, the seminary would likely be in the clear to move forward with tomorrow's auction. 

Unfortunately this means that unless Iraq has the liquidity to buy back its own cultural patrimony, or is able to find a generous benefactor willing to purchase the ancient relief on their behalf, this reminder of the lost Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II will unfortunately go to the highest bidder.

Update: 31 October 2018
The Assyrian gypsum relief of a winged Genius, reign of Ashurnasirpal II, sold for a USD $27,250,000 hammer price which equates to $35,903,875 including the buyer’s premium to an in-the-room buyer at Christie's New York: Paddle 811.

By:  Lynda Albertson

Despite the formal objections of two governments, Cyprus and Egypt, and an open letter of complaint from classical archaeologist and MacArthur Foundation Genius scholar and Toledo native, Joan Breton Connelly, Christie’s in New York and the Toledo Museum of Art have gone forward with their auction of 68 deaccessioned artworks from the museum's antiquities collection.  

Shaaban Abdel Gawad Supervisor-General of Egypt's Antiquities Repatriation Department at the antiquities ministry had earlier contacted the directors of UNESCO and the International Council of Museums, as well as Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who tried to work through the Egyptian embassy in the United States to persuade the museum to withdraw the Egyptian artefacts and return them to their country of origin.  The National Committee for Antiquities Repatriation led by Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany also met to discuss the proposed sale and to consider possible methods of postponing the sale or requesting that the objects be relinquished to Egypt.

Leonidas Pantelides, ambassador of Cyprus to the United States, voiced his own, somewhat softer objection on Monday, October 24, asking that the sale be postponed or that the museum reconsider keeping the items. 

In a letter of rebuttal to the public outcry, and in the most part to Dr. Connelly's rebuke of the sale, the Toledo Museum of Art issued a formal reply which is posted in its entirety on the museum's website. In explaining its rationale for going forward with the antiquities auction the museum stated:

"Quality has always been the outstanding attribute of our collection, and the objects being sold are not of the quality of our permanent display collection; have been on display rarely; have not been sought out by scholars; or have not been published in recent decades. In short, these objects were not working to fulfill our mission."

The rebuttal quotes from the AAMD - The Association of Art Museum Directors wherein the North American-based association states: 

“Deaccessioning is a legitimate part of the formation and care of collections and, if practiced, should be done in order to refine and improve the quality and appropriateness of the collection, the better to serve the museum’s mission.” 

The Toledo Museum of Art's statement further justified their decision to sell antiquities from their collection drawing from the collections ethics guidelines of the AAM - the American Alliance of Museums. 

In simple terms, the museum's letter spelled out that their decision to sell artifacts was not taken willy-nilly and in their eyes falls safely inside the AAMD code of ethics which provides that sales proceeds may not be used “for purposes other than acquisitions of works of art for the collection.” 

But the museum's decision, and the consequences of their decision, underscore the slippery slope museums can legally walk on, staying inside the perceived ethical boundaries of specific association guidelines in order to raise funds for new acquisitions, while still being allowed to divest themselves of no longer wanted art.

In total, 23 items from the museum's collection have been sold during Tuesday's New York auction including Lot 16 a Cypriot limestone head of a male votary, formally part of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities which sold for USD$ 68,750.

And Lot 6 an An Egyptian limestone fragment from the Early 26th Dynasty which sold for USD$162,500

The auction netted the Ohio art museum $640,000 on Tuesday.

The sale of the remaining 45 deaccessioned artworks continued via Christie’s web-based online auction site through Wednesday, October 26, 2016. The Online and live auctions at Christie’s generated almost USD $970,000 for the Toledo Museum of Art's new acquisitions fund.

Everyone likes a one man's trash is another man's treasure story.  But what can these stories tell us about collectors, collecting habits and the art market in antiquities in the 20th century in  the UK?

In November 2014, the family of a deceased elderly woman, Doreen Liddell, hired the services of an estate sale company, Penzance Auction House to go through the painful disposal of unwanted things us humans tend to accumulate over our lifetimes and that relatives frequently don't have the place for, or the emotional strength to actively sift through.  

Companies like these sort through a deceased person's household belongings, usually after the surviving family members have made a first-pass, marking or removing what they want to keep. The auctioneer's team, familiar with the mechanization of dealing with the property of the deceased,  pack up the momentos the family wants to keep preparing them for delivery to various destinations.  They then set to work valuating the remaining items the heirs aren't interested in retaining, preparing them for auction.  The last two steps usually involve donating the low value items to charities and chucking out the bitts and bobbs that remain.  In quick work company's like this one in Cornwall can clear the house of all evidence that was once a person's life. 

One item in this clean-out, a 7-inch tall bronze statuette of a cat, seemed destined for the trash dumpster parked on the driveway of Mrs. Liddell's cottage in Penzance, until auctioneer David Lay intervened.  Lay had a hunch that the regal looking cat with golden earrings set up near the fireplace was not a simple tourist trinket, but might be something special.  Following his instincts, he took the statue to specialists in Egyptian art at the British Museum. They identified the feline as a 26th Dynasty (672-525 BCE) Egyptian bronze.  

Statuettes symbolizing cats often served as votive offerings in Egyptian temples, and were frequently placed in tombs.  Almost all Egyptian gods were associated with some animal and assumed the form of a particular beast in Egyptian sculpture.  In this case the goddess, Bast, written as 'Bastet' by scribes to emphasis that the 't' was to be pronounced, is symbolized in the form of a feline.  In writing, her name has the hieroglyph of a 'bas'-jar with the feminine ending of 't' and during the Old Kingdom she was considered to be the daughter of Atum in Heliopolis.  She first appeared in animal form bearing the head of a lion.  Later,  in the New Kingdom, she took on the form of a domestic house cat like the animal bust found in the cottage.

Up for auction yesterday, the Bast statuette expected to sell for a conservative £5,000 to £10,000 GBP but instead sold for £52,000.  

But how did this ancient object find its way from an Egyptian tomb to a house in Western Cornwall?

It seems Doreen Liddell was the widow of Douglas Liddell, who, before his death was one of the biggest influences in British Numismatics. Liddell worked for Spink and Son Ltd, the prestigious auction house founded in London in 1666.   Starting out in their coin department just after the Second World War he would remain with the collecting firm through his retirement in December 1987.  He worked first in Spink's coin department, moving on to director of the company on the 1st June 1965, followed by a promotion to Managing Director in 1977, a post he retained until he retirement to Cornwall. 
 

Spink's has long been famous not only for its for its sales of Ancient Egyptian artefacts and in 1939 was tasked with selling the estate of archaeologist Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen's tomb, three months after Carter's death. 

It is likely that Douglas Liddell purchased the 2,500-year-old Egyptian bronze at one of Spink's many antiquities sales, but unfortunately like is true in many, many cases during the 1900s, collection histories weren't prized, even as is the case with this collector, by those in the biz.  The family has no recollection of, or record for the purchase of the Bast statue so the context of this piece; where it came from and who it belongs to before it was purchased by Liddell has sadly been lost.

In fairness to Mr. Liddell and collectors in general, even Howard Carter, methodical man though he was, kept no systematic record of the antiquities in his personal collection.   The closest thing researchers have to a record of his significant collection is the valuation of Carter's property for probate prepared by Spink and Son on 1 June 1939.

It is not publicly known yet, if this feline statue has a similar record of valuation by Spink, but it is possible that it has.

Can we estimate the purchase price?

Not exactly, but an early Spink and Son catalog from 1924 has been digitized so we have an idea of how antiquities increase their value over time. 

This catalog features objects from the MacGregor, Hilton Price, Amherst, Meux & Carnarvon collections and on page twelve pictures a larger Egyptian bronze cat, almost twice as tall as the one in Mrs. Liddell's cottage.  This one was estimated at auction at £400, a healthy sum relative the other items in the catalog and one that included delivery anywhere in the world.

Reproduced using an online inflation calculator that compares collector's prices in 1924 with the value of the British Pound in 2011, the scanned catalog illustrates the comparative values that continue to drive individuals to collect antiquities as financial investments.   Not only do these figures show that antiquities were worthwhile investments but their pricing gives ARCA's blog readers insight into how relatively easy it was for collectors to assemble large and diverse collections in the early years of the 20th Century with cheaply priced antiquities.

Back then you could even bring your mummy home for a simple £16  (See page 8).

While collectors are finding bargains today, which will appreciate in value just like this cat and this mummy did, we hope that today's contemporary collectors will begin to place greater importance on where an object comes from as well as better care of maintaining a collection history outlining their purchases.  That way the next generation of heirs don't toss grandpa's beloved kitty in the trash heap.

By Lynda Albertson

References Used in This Article

http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/bast.html

http://www.antiquitiesonline.co.uk/A-catalogue-from-the-golden-age-of-collecting_A10JF1.aspx

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-31524625

http://www.davidlay.co.uk/?_ga=1.59733733.991253984.1423311544

http://www.nicholasreeves.com/item.aspx?category=Writing&id=69

https://penzanceauctionhouse.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/something-quite-spectacular/
http://www.spink.com/news/newsletters/2003/200305coin_news.asp

By Lynda Albertson

Aphrodite eBay Auction Item

Aphrodite Website Auction Item

Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves  and Bust"/Estate of Pablo Picasso

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-chief

After international headlines reported the theft of a Picasso painting from Greece last week, a Spanish journalist inquired with ARCA as to why paintings by Pablo Picasso were the target of so many art heists? Was it because the artist was so productive? Or because he was so famous? In response, I said that headlines also typically reported record sales or 'the most expensive paintings' and that in the past two decades, paintings by Picasso had been sold publicly through auction houses and dubbed as "most expensive painting") (Wikipedia)

Here's the list of Picasso paintings as sold from 1989 through 2010 with links to a sample headline heralding the sale (Year of sale, title of painting, reported sales price in millions of US dollars, and the auction house):

1989, Au Lapin Agile, $40.7MM, Sotheby’s New York;

1989, Yo, Picasso, $47.85MM, Sotheby’s, New York;
1989, Les Noces de Pierrette, $49.3MM, Binoche et Godeau, Paris;

1999, Femme assise dans un jardin, $49.6MM, Sotheby’s, New York;
2000, Femme aux Bras Croisés, $55.0MM, Christie’s, New York;
2006, Dora Maar au Chat, $95.2MM, Sotheby’s New York;
2004, Garçon à la pipe, $104.2MM, 2004 Sotheby’s New York; and
2010, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, $106.5MM, Christie’s New York.

The publicity of record sales for Picasso paintings creates an awareness amongst thieves that the artworks by Picasso are valuable to both art collectors and the public.  A thief wouldn't need expert knowledge to determine which paintings on display are valuable, only access to the newspaper headlines reporting public sales of expensive art.