Dorothy Burr Thompson 1900-2001 by Jaimee P. Uhlenbrock
1 Dorothy Burr Thompson 1900-2001 by Jaimee P. Uhlenbrock In the early l870s terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic period began to appear on the antiquities market of Athens. Prospective buyers were told that they had come from graves near the ancient city of Tanagra in Boeotia, roughly 12 miles east of Thebes, where local inhabitants had dug them up from a vast cemetery. Of an outstanding artistic quality, they were quickly purchased by collectors eager to possess original examples of Greek sculpture, even though dealers also had resorted to selling pastiches and by 1876, outright forgeries because of the scarcity of good originals. Controlled excavations were carried out a Tanagra intermittently between 1874 and 1889 in an effort to halt the widespread looting of the graves that had developed because of the market demand for these “Tanagra figurines,” as they were called. Nevertheless, the archaeological contexts within which these Tanagras were found continued to be destroyed, and all evidence for dating and interpretation was hopelessly lost.1 The inclusion of Tanagras in an exhibition dedicated to Greek art from private collections in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 18782 resulted in intensified interest in them as collectibles, as well as intensified activity in the forger’s studio. This was, in large measure, facilitated by the fact that Tanagras were made from molds. Even though most false Tanagras were easily spotted by archaeologists, many nevertheless entered museum collections, so that the entire genre of Hellenistic terracottas began to be viewed with suspicion and distrust by the scholarly 2 community. Yet their popularity continued unabated among collectors.
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