Featherstone Vaults

Collection

Antiquities

Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Bronze Age and medieval material of documented ownership history.

Roman marble portrait bust of a man, mid-1st century CE.
Representative collection image · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Public Domain

How we catalogue it

Objects are taken on only where ownership history can be evidenced and export requirements are clear. Where an object's documented history begins later than 1970, that is stated in the entry rather than implied away. Condition, restoration and surface are described as found.

Classical · Medieval · Early

Currently catalogued01

Where an entry has not yet been photographed its plate is shown blank. Featherstone Vaults photography replaces them entry by entry; no stand-in imagery is used.

Buying in this department

What we look for

The documentary position comes before the object. We take on material only where ownership history can be evidenced, and the entry states the date at which the object can first be documented outside its country of origin. Where that date is later than a buyer might assume, we say so before an offer is made rather than afterwards.

Surface is the other thing we spend time on. Excavated bronze and iron carry a history of burial, cleaning and sometimes over-cleaning. Stripped, re-patinated and recut surfaces are identified in the entry.

The legal position

Buyers in the United Kingdom are operating within a framework that includes the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003, and a trade convention of treating 1970, the year of the UNESCO Convention on cultural property, as the reference date for ownership history.

We do not handle material we believe to have left its country of origin unlawfully, and we decline objects where the position cannot be established. This is a commercial judgement as much as an ethical one: an object with an unresolved question is hard to insure, lend, move across a border or sell again.

Worth asking

When does the documented history begin, and what evidence supports each step. Has the object been tested, and by which laboratory. Is an export licence likely to be needed, and what happens to the sale if it is refused.

A dealer should be able to answer each of these in writing before you commit, and should volunteer the difficult ones unprompted.

Further reading

From the Journal02

Research written against this department: what to check, what the documents should say, and where the record usually stops.

From the archive01