While facing renewed accusations of cultural theft, the institution announced that it had been the victim of actual theft—from someone on the inside.
Charles Townley, one of Britain’s first great collectors of antiquities, was born in Lancashire in 1737. A distaff descendant of the aristocratic Howard family, he was educated mostly in France—a common path for a well-born Catholic Englishman. Elegant and intelligent, Townley was, according to an early biographical sketch, eagerly welcomed into Continental society, “from the dissipations of which it would be incorrect to say that he wholly escaped.” As a young adult, he returned to England and installed himself at the family estate, having come into a lavish inheritance. But before long he set off for Italy, in what would be the first of three visits. In a dozen years, he amassed more than two hundred ancient sculptures, along with other objects.
It was a good moment for a man of means to build such a collection. Many Italian nobles were seeing their fortunes dwindle, and could be persuaded to part with inherited objects for the right price. In Naples, Townley bought from the Principe di Laurenzano a Roman bust of a young woman with downcast eyes, identified as the nymph Clytie. (Later, Townley humorously referred to Clytie as his wife, though he was not the marrying kind.) Excavations were then under way at Hadrian’s Villa, the retreat that the Emperor had built outside Rome, and collectors raced to buy art works as soon as they were removed from the ground. An élite dealer named Thomas Jenkins, who kept a place on the Via del Corso for displaying ancient wares, sold Townley, among other objects, a statue of a naked, muscled discus thrower. From the seventeen-eighties onward, Townley showed off his collection in his London town house, near St. James’s Park. A painting by Johan Zoffany, first exhibited under the title “A Nobleman’s Collection,” depicts Townley and several friends in a library crammed with dozens of marbles, including a seven-foot Venus on a pedestal—her arm raised and her draperies lowered. In the background are wooden cabinets in which Townley presumably housed smaller treasures, including countless cameos and intaglios.
Townley’s museum was said to rank below only a handful of other private collections in Europe in breadth and quality. According to Max Bryant, the author of a 2017 monograph on Townley and his house, the collection also reflected “an eighteenth-century attitude to art that itself has become lost to modernity.” At the time, ancient sculptures were typically restored right after being excavated—often boldly. Scholars have concluded that Clytie’s bosom was enhanced to accentuate the bust’s erotic charge; Townley’s discobolus, unearthed in a state of decapitation, was fitted with a head from a different sculpture.
In 1791, Townley was made a trustee of the British Museum. The first national public museum, it was established by an act of Parliament, in 1753, and was initially formed around the collection of Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish physician and businessman. When Townley died, in 1805, the museum acquired his sculptures for the then considerable sum of twenty thousand pounds, and a gallery showcasing them opened three years later.
But Townley’s collection was soon decisively eclipsed. By 1810, aficionados of ancient sculpture had begun clamoring to see a different cache of ancient marbles, which was being housed in a shed in Mayfair. One young artist, Benjamin Robert Haydon, wrote, of seeing the works, “I felt as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind, and I knew that they would at last rouse the art of Europe from its slumber in the darkness.” These sculptures came not from Italy but from Ottoman-occupied Athens, where they had been pried from, or otherwise collected around, the ruins of the Parthenon, at the instruction of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin.
In 1799, Lord Elgin, a Scottish nobleman thirty-odd years Townley’s junior, arrived in Constantinople as Britain’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The project of removing the marbles from the Parthenon, the fifth-century temple on the Acropolis, and shipping them to Britain took more than a decade—about half of the original five-hundred-and-twenty-four-foot frieze was removed, as were a number of life-size statues from the pediments. Elgin originally intended to install all of it at Broomhall, his ancestral home, northwest of Edinburgh. But he ran into financial difficulties, and in 1816 the Parthenon marbles, plus dozens of other sculptures from the Acropolis, were acquired from Elgin by Parliament for the British Museum. The price, thirty-five thousand pounds, was set by comparison with the Townley collection, but the esteemed sculptor Joseph Nollekens declared, “I reckon them very much higher than the Townley marbles for beauty.”
The arrival in Britain of what became known as the Elgin Marbles encouraged an appreciation of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of the ancient Greeks over their later Roman copyists. The display of the marbles—eventually, in a custom-built gallery considerably larger than the one featuring Townley’s collection—also helped establish the practice of leaving fragmentary statues unrestored. Although the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles was controversial from the start (Lord Byron decried their removal from the Acropolis as vandalism), the sculptures’ significance was immediately acknowledged. They were so prized, in fact, that soon after Greece became an independent state, in 1830, it demanded the statues back—a request that British diplomats have consistently rejected.
Over time, the reputation of Townley’s marbles steadily declined. The gallery dedicated to his collection was demolished in 1841, during an expansion of the museum, and many sculptures that he’d acquired migrated to storerooms. Already hidden away were the cameos, intaglios, and other small items from his collection, which had been acquired from his heir in 1814. Many of these objects had not been thoroughly documented, and this meant that when some of them started disappearing nobody even noticed that they were gone.
In the past year or so, the British Museum has been wrestling—often in public, and often to its considerable embarrassment—with what might be characterized as the twin legacies of Townley and Elgin. In late 2022, reports emerged that the chair of the museum’s trustees, George Osborne, was in negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and that a deal might be struck to allow the Parthenon Sculptures, as they are now commonly called, to be sent, in some fashion, to Greece. Many Britons have long favored resolving the diplomatic stalemate; others branded the notion outrageous. Soon after Osborne became chair, a headline in the Daily Express warned, “don’t let british museum or elgin marbles be caught by woke ideology.” Not long afterward, the museum was jolted by scandal when it was revealed that hundreds of objects—including cameos and intaglios once owned by Townley—had been stolen, and some of them sold off, over a period of many years, apparently by a member of the museum’s own curatorial staff. The Daily Mail contributed a typically lurid summation: “hunt for priceless gems stolen in netflix-style heist.”
The sensational headlines were somewhat misleading: in the context of ancient archeology, the term “gem” typically refers not to diamonds or rubies but to engraved semiprecious stones or objects cast from glass. Enlightenment-era connoisseurs such as Townley sometimes bought the less valuable of these objects by the handful. (Cameos are carved in raised relief, intaglios in negative relief.) Their ancient owners prized them as miniature works of art. According to Martin Henig, a senior academic visitor at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology, Roman emperors appear to have given cameos, which were conveniently portable, as tributes or gifts to secure political alliances. Even quite ordinary people might aspire to own a glass gem, set in a signet ring, depicting a god or a mythological figure of personal significance. A glass gem discovered at a Roman fortress near the city of Oxford features a horse and a cornet, suggesting that its owner was a horn-playing member of the cavalry. Henig told me, “The best of the cameos, and the best of the intaglios, were probably much more highly valued than sculptures,” which were often mass-produced in workshops. The designs of such artists as Dioskourides, a gem engraver who worked for Emperor Augustus, were extremely coveted. Today, the most prized gems can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. For scholars, the importance of the gems lies not just in their beauty but also in the light their iconography sheds on ancient concerns and preoccupations.
The uproar over the Townley thefts and the controversy over the Elgin discussions mean that the British Museum has been in the headlines to an unusual extent for a cultural institution, even one that was last year’s most visited tourist attraction in London. But it was inevitable that the British Museum would become the focus of scrutiny. The museum, a repository of more than eight million artifacts from around the world, most of them acquired during Britain’s reign as an imperial overlord, holds not just classical sculptures but also Anglo-Saxon weapons, Chinese ceramics, Assyrian wall panels, and the Rosetta Stone. Along with similar institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the British Museum has increasingly faced ethical questions about how it amassed its collection. In addition to being petitioned by the Greeks, the British Museum is being challenged for its holding of bronzes looted in the late nineteenth century by British forces from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria. Restitution claims have also been made regarding sacred objects from Ethiopia.
The Townley thefts were facilitated by the fact that curators had never fully recorded many of the objects in internal catalogues or databases. Indeed, it was reported that individual records for some 2.4 million items at the British Museum were lacking, calling into question its long-standing, and sometimes arrogantly expressed, claim to be an unimpeachable custodian for vulnerable artifacts. For some observers, it was an irresistible irony that actual thefts had occurred at an institution long accused of cultural theft. When a British TV channel asked viewers to contribute ideas for end-of-year jokes, the museum was the butt of the winning entry: “Did you hear about the Christmas cake on display in the British Museum? It was Stollen.”
The British Museum has never been merely a trove of exquisite art works. It was also intended, through the depths of its holdings, to be an archive of the world—a library of things. It was established by eighteenth-century polymaths as an expression of the Enlightenment conviction that universal truths might be arrived at through intellectual inquiry and scientific reason. The museum’s wildly disparate collections could never be compiled today, which is both the institution’s strength and its point of weakness. Why should the sarcophagi of Egyptian kings or the fragments of ancient Greek architecture be housed in London, and claimed in some sense as British? Townley, Elgin, and the other men whose acquisitions filled the institution’s galleries would not have thought of such questions; today they are, rightly, unavoidable. At a certain point in a museum’s history, it becomes more than just a repository of the cultural and artistic past, telling a story about the history of a nation, or a people, or the world. It also becomes a museum of itself—of its formation, its collecting history, its priorities, and its failings.
The British Museum’s painful self-examination might never have occurred had it not been for the persistence of Ittai Gradel, a Danish dealer and collector of antiquities. Gradel does not hunt for discoveries in the excavated ruins of palaces and temples, as his eighteenth-century predecessors did. Instead, he has often sifted through that twenty-first-century site of buried treasure—eBay. He has worked at universities in Denmark and in the U.K., and has a special interest in ancient cameos and intaglios. But he was not suited to academic life, seeing himself more in the lineage of gentleman collectors who combined scholarship and connoisseurship with the thrill of discovery.
A few years ago, Gradel paid two thousand euros to a German auction house for what was described online as a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cameos. He later confirmed what he had suspected immediately on examining a photograph of one of the pieces: it was an ancient Roman cameo of Germanicus Caesar which Johann Winckelmann—the German scholar who is considered the father of Western art history—had described as one of the finest examples he’d ever seen. The cameo’s whereabouts had been unknown for more than two hundred years. Gradel told me recently, “What I am looking out for is the mistakes, and the stupidity, of other dealers and auction houses. That is where the bargains are.”
More than a dozen years ago, Gradel was offered a reserve of glass and stone gems from another dealer. The objects purportedly came from an estate sale conducted in the North of England in the early twentieth century. Between 2010 and 2013, Gradel bought almost three hundred of them. He sold a few and kept the rest. The gems were of such quality and quantity that he assumed they were part of an old aristocratic collection gathered on a Grand Tour; he had a hunch that they might have once belonged to the Howard family, whose estate, in North Yorkshire, is now known for its prominent appearance in the 1981 adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited.” The family had sold some precious-stone gems to the British Museum in the Victorian era, and Gradel theorized that these less valuable glass gems may have been sold off around the same time. Looking for information about a possible Howard connection, he sent inquiries to curators in the British Museum’s Department of Greece and Rome, but received no response. Meanwhile, Gradel told me, “more and more of these gems kept turning up—the vender would say these were the last, and then he would open another drawer, and there were some more gems. I concluded, frankly, that he was elderly and a bit dotty.” After 2011, the supply began to dwindle, and Gradel was informed that the seller, whose name was Paul Higgins, had died.
Not long afterward, similar gems started appearing on eBay. Gradel made inquiries about the origins of these items, and the seller said that he’d inherited them from his grandfather Frank Nicholls, an antique-shop owner in York, who had died in 1953. Gradel checked the grandfather’s name against records available online; the details aligned, except that Nicholls’s year of death was actually 1952. It was the kind of mistake, Gradel figured, that could easily happen when information was passed down through a family. But he noticed something peculiar: this seller’s name was also Paul Higgins. “I eventually asked him specifically if he was related to this first Paul Higgins, who was now deceased, from whom I had bought a lot of similar gems some years before,” Gradel recalled. “He replied, ‘He’s no relation of mine. But I agree it’s an odd coincidence.’ ”
This Higgins seemed ignorant of the value of what he had, sometimes asking only forty or fifty pounds for objects that Gradel could tell were worth far more, possibly as much as several thousand pounds. Sometimes he felt moved to enlighten the seller about the true value of his wares. Gradel spent a hundred and fifty pounds on a ring that he felt, based on the seller’s photograph, was so well preserved it had to be a fake—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imitations of ancient gems had proliferated among collectors. But when the ring arrived he was amazed to discover that it was original, dating from the third century B.C. “So I wrote to him and said, ‘I made a mistake. Now I have it in hand, I realize it is the real deal,’ ” Gradel told me. He offered to return it, or to pay an additional five hundred pounds. The seller accepted the cash. “You can say that was jolly decent of me,” Gradel explained. “But it was also, of course, because I wanted to be in his good books. If he had more items in his drawers, I would like for him to come to me first.”
After Gradel bought a cast-glass gem from the seller, he was delighted to discover that, according to an eighteenth-century catalogue, it had once belonged to none other than Charles Townley. Gradel was a bit surprised, having believed that all of Townley’s gems had gone to the British Museum. He concluded that this one must have been disposed of in some other fashion, and thought no more about it.
Gradel’s interactions with the eBay seller, though, grew more and more perplexing. At one point, the seller listed a group of items very similar to the ones he’d said had come from his grandfather’s shop, but asserted that he’d bought this cache in a junk shop. Gradel explained to me, “These types of ancient glass objects are not that common, so it would be a bit strange that he himself happened to stumble across a batch of exactly the same type. It was not impossible, but it was an uncanny coincidence.” It was also weird, he thought, that the seller had bought the items in a junk shop in the first place, given his apparent ignorance of their value and provenance. But Gradel reassured himself that the seller was simply “clueless,” because many of the objects “were totally misdescribed.”
Except when they weren’t. “Some of the objects were absolutely correctly described online as ancient,” Gradel said. “That was also odd.” Gradel began to think that the seller was hiding something: “Every bit of evidence could be innocently explained, but the sum total began to appear rather strange.”
Then, in 2016, something even stranger happened: the seller posted on eBay a fragment of an onyx cameo featuring a young woman in profile alongside Priapus, the god of fertility. Gradel recognized the fragment as one that had been described in a 1926 British Museum catalogue of engraved gems and cameos. The cameo, Gradel said, was not listed on the museum’s Web site, however, and he still believed that the seller was acting in good faith: “Even though it was clearly a case of theft from the museum, it apparently in all probability had taken place many, many years ago—before his grandfather had died, in 1952.” He made inquiries about buying the fragment, only to be told by the seller that he’d posted it in error: it actually belonged to his sister, who did not want to let go of it. Gradel continued to buy from the seller until 2018.
In May, 2020, Gradel was checking the British Museum’s Web site when he made an alarming discovery: a photograph of the cameo fragment depicting the girl and Priapus. So it did belong to the museum. On eBay, however, the cameo’s gold mount had been removed. “Clearly, the museum’s photo could not possibly predate 1952—that told me the provenance story was a lie,” Gradel said. “And if the seller had been lying to me about that, I could trust absolutely nothing he had told me.” He went back through his records and discovered that the name on his final PayPal receipt, from 2018—the only one recent enough to remain accessible on his online account—was not Paul Higgins but Peter Higgs. In a phone conversation with a colleague in the U.K., Gradel described his confusion. “I said, ‘I don’t understand it, his real name is Peter Higgs, and he’s been lying, and there’s some trickery going on.’ And my colleague said, ‘You do realize, don’t you, that that’s the name of a curator at the British Museum?’ And then all my hair stood on end.” If the thief was a professional curator, then Gradel had been tricked in more ways than one: the improper valuations of some items hadn’t been a sign of ignorance but, rather, a crafty way for Higgs to disguise his identity.
About a year earlier, Gradel had been offered, via a middleman, a fragment of a stone gem being sold by a retired dealer and collector, Malcolm Hay; after examining it, he had decided against buying it. Later, he had found this gem, too, listed on the British Museum’s Web site, and passed word on to Hay. Gradel then learned that the gem had come from the same eBay seller with whom Gradel had done business. In the summer of 2020, Hay alerted the museum that one of its catalogued objects had been offered on the open market. He was told that the matter would be investigated. At the time, the pandemic had closed the museum to visitors, and curators were working from home. “I should have thought it was a fairly simple task of going into the strong room and checking whether the object was there,” Gradel said. “But there was no urgency, because there was lockdown, and museum employees couldn’t get into the museum anyway. So the thief couldn’t steal anything else.”
The museum reopened in August, 2020, allowing only a limited number of visitors and staff. By early 2021, as far as Gradel knew, an inquiry into Hay’s claim had not been completed, so he wrote an e-mail to the museum’s deputy director, Jonathan Williams, outlining in detail the compromising information he had gleaned about three items that appeared to have been stolen from the museum: the Townley gem, the onyx cameo, and the Hay fragment. He shared what he knew about the identity of the seller, and named Peter Higgs, the British Museum curator, as the likely culprit. In the e-mail, Gradel noted with dismay that the museum had apparently left “Townley gems lying around for over 200 years without ever doing even the most cursory registration,” adding, “The lack of registration would have been an open invitation to a thief, since no one would then miss them . . . and their presence in the collections could never be proven once they had left” the British Museum. There was, he declared, “no decent explanation of what I have here discovered.”
Several months after Gradel wrote his letter, the British Museum announced a new chairman of its board of trustees: George Osborne, the former Conservative Party politician and the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016. Osborne was born to inherited wealth and social rank—he is the heir apparent to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon, an Irish title—and was best known as the architect of austerity, a policy of radical public-spending cuts initiated when the Tories took power in 2010. Austerity rendered Osborne deeply unpopular—thousands booed him when he appeared at a sporting event—and his political career was cut short in 2016, when he and Prime Minister David Cameron found themselves on the losing, pro-E.U. side of the Brexit referendum.
Many cultural observers were dismayed that a man who had inflicted harsh cuts on British cultural institutions would now help lead the country’s most famous museum. But none could dispute that he was peerlessly connected in the realms of politics and finance. It was also easy to imagine that Osborne might wish to burnish a new legacy for himself.
By the time Osborne took over as chair, a major refurbishment of the museum had long been scheduled. The museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, who previously oversaw the state collections in Dresden, had been appointed, in 2016, with the forbidding mandate of creating a master plan to renovate the museum and improve its displays, allowing them to be modernized so as to show collections more coherently. Plans had also been laid for a new archeological-research facility in Reading, forty miles outside London. (It opens later this year.) The museum’s trustees likely hoped that Osborne, with his ties to international finance, would be instrumental in raising the billion pounds of private money reportedly required to finance these projects.
Osborne, for his part, was eager to resolve the seemingly intractable problem of the museum’s possession of the Parthenon Sculptures. Not long after being appointed to the board, he reportedly met privately in London with Prime Minister Mitsotakis. In subsequent months, the men continued their unofficial conversation, eventually arriving at the idea that some of the sculptures currently in London might be brought to Athens; reciprocally, the Greeks would lend for temporary exhibition some treasures from their museums which had rarely, if ever, left the country. (The Mask of Agamemnon, a gold funerary mask from Mycenae, now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, was mentioned in media reports as one possibility.) The proposal fell far short of the full restitution that has long been Greece’s stated aim, but interested observers expressed confidence that language could be found to avoid the inflammatory term “loan,” the use of which would imply an acknowledgment—unacceptable to the Greeks—that the Parthenon Sculptures are legitimately owned by the British Museum. (One euphemism that has been considered, they said, is “deposit.”)
Although the Parthenon is now considered the ultimate representation of Greek national identity, when Lord Elgin arrived in Constantinople, in 1799, Athens had been under Ottoman rule for more than three hundred years. The Acropolis was then home to a jumble of buildings, including not just the ancient temple—which, for a time, had been turned into a Christian church—but also a Frankish tower and various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Turkish structures.
Lord Elgin became interested in the Parthenon Sculptures before he saw them. He commissioned several artists, including an Italian painter, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, to go to Athens to draw the marbles, hoping that such images might inspire new developments in the arts and crafts of Britain. (Elgin had considered hiring a promising young British artist for the task, but was put off by the fee demanded; as a result, J. M. W. Turner was not sent to Greece to render the ruins.) In 1801, the governing Turkish authority apparently informed an emissary of Elgin’s in Athens that fallen pieces of the temple could be excavated and removed. Once work began at the site, this permission was very liberally interpreted both by Elgin’s representatives, who started cutting sculptures off the building, and by the Turkish authorities, who appear to have been bribed to ignore such actions.
According to William St. Clair’s book “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” by the time Elgin first visited Athens, in 1802, many of the Parthenon Sculptures were already in packing cases, ready to be sent by sea to England. The journey was perilous. One of the ships carrying the heavy cargo sank off the Peloponnesian coast, requiring an expensive salvage job. Elgin’s own return to England, in 1803, had a major disruption: he arrived in Paris just before war was declared between Britain and France, and was detained as a prisoner of war (albeit partly in a Pyrenean spa town). Some three years passed before he returned to Britain. When he did, he found himself ensnarled in a costly divorce that, together with the vast expenses he had incurred to obtain the Parthenon Sculptures, ultimately led him to sell the marbles to Britain.
The museum’s accession of the marbles was always controversial, not least because any original documentation of Elgin’s agreements with the Turkish authorities was lost. (Only a copy, in Italian translation, remains.) The scholar and British Museum trustee Mary Beard, in her book “The Parthenon” (2002), writes that after Greece gained independence from Ottoman rule it made a priority of highlighting its national ancestry. Part of this project was to turn the Acropolis into a monument to the fifth century B.C. by removing everything that wasn’t classical from the site. Buildings erected in later eras were demolished, and shattered columns were resurrected. Beard writes that the director of excavations hailed the site as “cleansed of all barbaric additions, a noble monument to the Greek genius.” For the newly established nation, the temple’s symbolic potency was made all the greater by its earlier occupation and ravaging. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Greek minister in London unsuccessfully requested that the frieze fragments be returned. In 2009, Greece made another argument, this one in bricks and mortar, by opening the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill; it includes a top-floor gallery showcasing the sculptures that Elgin left behind, with plaster casts pointedly filling in the gaps.
The British Museum has consistently defended its ownership of the marbles, which in any case it is not permitted to just give away: according to the British Museum Act of 1963, it cannot deaccession any objects that have “become vested in the Trustees by virtue of a gift or bequest,” except under limited circumstances. Elgin’s initial contention to Parliament—that he had prevented the Turks from turning the sculptures into mortar—gave way, over time, to an institutional claim: that the marbles were less vulnerable in a London museum than they would have been if left exposed to the elements in Athens. (As early as the eighteen-fifties, however, concerns were raised about the effect of London’s grime on the marbles.) In recent decades, people within the museum have stopped making this point so loudly, but a wall text in the museum next to a caryatid from the Erechtheion—a column from another temple on the Acropolis, sculpted in the form of a woman, that was also brought to Britain by Elgin—notes that the five caryatids that remained in situ, and are now in the Acropolis Museum, are “much corroded after nearly two more centuries of weathering.”
Under the leadership of Neil MacGregor, the charismatic director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, the principal argument made for the sculptures’ retention was that they were part of a global narrative: “the private collection of every citizen of the world,” as MacGregor put it. In 2014, the museum loaned out one of its Parthenon Sculptures, a figure of the river god Ilissos, for the first time—but to the State Hermitage Museum, in Russia, not to an institution in Greece.
Others have suggested that the sculptures, having been in England for two hundred years, are now part of British history, in addition to Greek history. After Hartwig Fischer became director, he mounted the argument that moving cultural heritage from its place of origin into any museum—in London, Athens, or elsewhere—was itself a “creative act,” offering a revelatory change of context. At a cosmopolitan museum, a Greek sculpture can be juxtaposed with a Persian one; the religious iconography of one culture can be readily compared with that of others. The history of the Parthenon, Fischer told a Greek newspaper, had actually been “enriched” by the fact that some parts of it “are located in Athens and some are in London, where six million people see them every year.” (George Vardas, a journalist who supports the marbles’ repatriation, scoffed, “The imperialist patronage of the British Museum has no limits.”)
Any arrangement that would have the effect of restoring the sculptures to Greece seemed to be in conflict with the British Museum’s official position. A statement by the institution’s board of trustees maintains that “there’s a great public benefit to seeing the sculptures within the context of the world collection of the British Museum.” To advocates of retaining the sculptures, Osborne’s attempted deal with Mitsotakis had the hallmark of a politician’s strategy: a short-term solution that overlooks inevitable consequences. Would a Parthenon agreement cause the museum to be deluged with demands for the repatriation of other foreign treasures? And how could the institution guarantee that a sovereign nation would not violate a loan agreement? Some observers of Greek domestic politics acknowledge that there is little chance of any government there acquiescing to the marbles being shipped back to Britain.
For those who feel that the proper place of the sculptures is in Greece, though, framing a return as a “deposit” might help ease the British public into accepting the concession. Lord Vaizey, a former Conservative culture minister, is now the chair of the Parthenon Project—a group, funded by a Greek businessman named John Lefas, that has been advocating for an agreement that would result in a de-facto repatriation without explicitly calling it a Greek victory. Vaizey told me, “There’s a big part of me that feels, if and when the sculptures were reunited in that setting, it would be one of those moments when people would say, almost immediately, ‘Why did we wait so long?’ ” By early 2023, with Osborne working behind the scenes, the British Museum seemed closer than it had ever been to resolving its Elgin problem. But it was about to be overwhelmed by the consequences of Townley’s neglected legacy.
After Gradel submitted his letter to Jonathan Williams, the deputy director of the British Museum, in February, 2021, he received an acknowledgment of receipt. A few months later, he prodded again, and eventually got a short message from Williams. The museum, Williams said, had conducted a thorough investigation, “which found that the objects concerned are all accounted for . . . with no suggestion of any wrong-doing on behalf of any member of Museum staff.”
Gradel was incensed—if Williams was correct, how had a piece demonstrably from the museum’s collection ended up on eBay? But his requests for further elucidation were rebuffed in a subsequent e-mail, in which Williams told him that his allegations were “wholly unfounded.” At this point, Gradel made sure to put in writing his consequent position regarding his purchases. “As these my suspicions are, then, wholly unfounded, I have no reason whatsoever to suspect anything I bought from that Ebay seller,” he wrote. “I am glad to finally leave this behind me.”
But Gradel could not actually let the matter go. “I knew this was baloney, obviously,” he told me. “And, also, it implied that I had made a frivolous accusation against them. I don’t like having a reputation as someone who goes around bandying frivolous accusations against all and sundry.” He did not feel that he could go immediately to the board of trustees, since he had so recently been shut down by the museum’s administration. Nor could he approach the police with his suspicions. “I asked friends of mine, and they advised me, ‘You can’t do anything, because the victim of the crime you claim is the British Museum, and the injured party denies that a crime has even taken place.’ ” Gradel was in contact with other scholars, including Martin Henig, at Oxford. Henig told me that Gradel “was clearly upset, because the British Museum just didn’t believe him.”
In 2022, Gradel contacted a museum trustee, Paul Ruddock, informing him of his suspicions and of his fears that a scandal was being covered up. In fact, the museum was already concerned that its earlier assurances to Gradel had been misplaced. In August, 2021, after Gradel wrote to Williams, a spot check of the Department of Greece and Rome had been conducted, revealing “an item not in its proper location within the Greece and Rome strongroom,” according to a later statement by the museum. In April, 2022, staffers launched a more extensive audit of the department’s holdings and discovered that approximately two thousand objects were missing or damaged—in particular, cameos and intaglios. It appeared that the thief had tried to cover his tracks by altering digital databases; a recent civil filing alleges that Higgs made more than eighty edits “related to stolen, partially stolen or damaged items,” and that there was “no legitimate reason” for this activity. He is also suspected of having inserted into a museum catalogue a forged handwritten note falsely suggesting that in 1963 the museum lost the stone fragment that was acquired decades later by Malcolm Hay. (Higgs seems to have sold it in 2015.) Around the end of 2022, the police were discreetly called in.
Items going missing within museums, or being stolen from them, is hardly unheard of, and the British Museum had experienced high-profile thefts before. In 1993, robbers broke into the museum through the roof and made off with a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of Roman coins and jewelry. In 2002, a visitor lifted a twenty-five-hundred-year-old Greek head from a closed gallery. Two years later, fifteen items of medieval Chinese jewelry were stolen. Museums are vulnerable to theft from insiders, too. In a notorious case from the nineteen-fifties, John Nevin, an assistant at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, was prosecuted for stealing some two thousand items, including a table that he was thought to have smuggled out by hiding its legs down his pants. He had furnished his modest home with the loot, and was later sentenced to three years in prison. “Taking the things became an obsession as I was attracted by the beauty of them,” he reportedly confessed. In 2002, the London Sunday Timessent an undercover journalist to the British Museum’s Department of Greece and Rome to pose as a work trainee; the security was so lax that the reporter was able to smuggle an ancient Greek statue of a foot out of the gallery and past guards without being caught.
What was especially shocking about the gem thefts, when they were eventually made public, in August, 2023, was the seniority of the apparent culprit: Higgs, who was fired that month, had worked at the museum for three decades. Curators at the British Museum are highly qualified but not especially well paid: a salary of around fifty thousand dollars for an experienced curator is not unusual. The rewards of the job are not entirely monetary; many curators have dedicated their lives to a narrow specialization and have a profound commitment to the objects in their care. The idea that a curator may have not just stolen objects but actively damaged them by removing gold settings—presumably to sell the parts separately—appalled former colleagues.
Ironically, Higgs had been liberally quoted in the Sunday Times exposé about the museum’s weak security. “It’s chaos down here,” he told the newspaper. In 2021, he was made acting keeper for the Greek and Roman collections, though he did not end up getting the permanent job; other recent duties included curating one of the museum’s touring exhibitions, “Ancient Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes,” which travelled to Australia in 2021 and later to the Suzhou Museum, in China.
According to the recent civil filing, Higgs has “indicated that he intends to dispute the Claim but his Defence provides no particulars of that denial.” No formal charges have yet been brought against him. He did not answer my requests to talk to him. The filing indicates that he has been unable to respond effectively to the proceedings because of “severe mental strain.”
But in December, 2021, to promote the “Ancient Greeks” exhibition, he gave a lively interview to the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he recounted that his formative exposure to the arts of antiquity had been through a great-uncle who ran a fish-and-chips shop in the North of England, and whose garden featured a marble copy of the Laocoön. Now in the Vatican Museums, the Laocoön is the most famous sculpture of antiquity, showing the priest of Apollo and his two sons struggling with a pair of flesh-eating snakes. Higgs said of the copy, “I climbed all over it, and I absolutely loved it. And it must have gotten into my head.” One of his favorite items in the “Ancient Greeks” show, Higgs revealed, was an exquisitely engraved chalcedony gem, barely the size of a postage stamp. It depicted Nike, the goddess of war, her draperies falling off her body as she piles up arms and armor seized in battle. Higgs told the paper that the gem, which was acquired by the British Museum in 1865, is “one of the finest examples that I’ve seen in the world.” It is also the kind of thing that Charles Townley would have delighted in.
Late last year, the annual dinner of the trustees of the British Museum was held, for the first time in anyone’s memory, in the Duveen Gallery, where the Parthenon sculptures are displayed. Tables were laid out for wealthy donors and eminent guests from the worlds of politics and culture. In a speech, Osborne made forthright reference to his negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister, and to his hope for an “agreement that enables these great sculptures to be seen in Athens as well as London.” Osborne also spoke of the thefts. “We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, or it doesn’t matter, or that some years ago we weren’t warned,” he said. “It was our duty to look after these objects, and we failed in that duty.”
In late July, shortly before the public revelation of the thefts, the museum had announced that Hartwig Fischer would be ending his term as director in 2024, but would stay in the job while the search for a successor was under way. A month later, in the wake of revelations of the museum’s failure to heed Gradel’s warning, Fischer tendered his immediate resignation. “The responsibility for that failure must ultimately rest with the director,” Fischer said. He recently sent me this comment: “The functioning of a museum requires the probity of its staff. That any member of staff would breach this rule, steal, and damage a public good, is shocking.” The museum, he noted, “is an organisation with a deep sense of responsibility for the artefacts in its custody. Clearly, it was upsetting for all to see this abused by an individual whom we trusted.”
In mid-December the museum published an account of the findings of an internal review, which announced the forthcoming documentation and digitization of the entire collection, in order to “eliminate any pockets of unregistered objects.” (About half of the collection has been fully digitized to date.) The report also provided a few sketchy details about the ongoing quest to find what had been lost, revealing that, of the two thousand or so missing or damaged objects, only about three hundred and fifty had so far been recovered—the majority of them with the assistance of Gradel. Jonathan Williams, the deputy director who had brushed Gradel off when he first raised alarms, resigned at the end of the year. In March, Nicholas Cullinan, the head of the National Portrait Gallery, who has been much praised for the renovation of that institution, was named as Fischer’s replacement. He will take up the post this summer.
For some people associated with the British Museum, the recent tumult made the larger questions of purpose that hallowed museums are facing only more pressing. Mary Beard, speaking in her personal capacity, rather than as a trustee of the museum, told me, “You have to think, How do we share, and do we want to share, the heritage of world culture? And how do we share it outside of the conventional hubs of cultural ownership: Western European capitals and the places where objects came from?” Museums should be thinking about what they will look like fifty years or a hundred years from now, Beard went on. “With something like the Parthenon marbles—this is Beard fantasy, but I like the idea of them going to Mumbai or Auckland,” she said. “What do we mean when we talk of our ‘shared heritage of Hellenism’? It goes far beyond London, Paris, New York, and Athens.”
No new developments in the Parthenon-marbles discussions have been reported in recent months. Lord Vaizey told me, “Unfortunately, standing on top of a stepladder to change a light bulb and still being a foot away from the socket—to change the light bulb is impossible.” Nevertheless, the prospect of the marbles making a return of some sort to Athens seems likelier than it has for two hundred years. Recently, the Metropolitan Museum has put on display, for at least the next decade, an exhibit of Cycladic objects privately collected by the American businessman Leonard Stern. An international deal was struck to avoid possible legal challenges to the collection’s provenance. The wall text of the installation, which was arranged in agreement with the Museum of Cycladic Art, in Athens, and with the Greek government, notes that everything on display is now considered the property of Greece. Prime Minister Mitsotakis heralded the negotiations, which took place over two years, as a paradigm for dealing with contentious issues of patrimony. “Given that the evidentiary procedures for any judicial claim around cultural property is in most cases very difficult, expensive, and cumbersome, a more pragmatic approach is often the more practical approach,” he said. In November, the beleaguered British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak huffily cancelled a meeting with Mitsotakis after his Greek counterpart told an interviewer that dividing the Parthenon Sculptures was like cutting the Mona Lisa in half. In spite of this, Mitsotakis later said, “I believe both parties have the vision to see beyond past division to embrace a new win-win era of partnership.”
For the time being, a visitor to the British Museum can still behold the Parthenon Sculptures—perhaps after weaving through the Greek and Roman galleries, where some years ago a clumsy waiter at a function accidentally knocked a thumb off the hand of Charles Townley’s scantily clad Venus. Or one can make a detour through the thematic Enlightenment Gallery, where Townley’s discobolus is displayed not far from the seductive Clytie, who stands on a pedestal a few feet from a bust of Townley himself, looking dashing in an open-necked ruffled shirt. Until June, a visitor can even dip into a room near the museum’s entrance to visit a small exhibition titled “Rediscovering Gems,” which showcases a handful of the glass gems that Higgs allegedly stole from the Townley collection, along with other cameos and intaglios that illustrate why these long-overlooked objects exerted such a fascination during the era of the museum’s founding.
I stopped by the exhibition recently, and saw that one of Townley’s desktop cabinets was on display. Several of its drawers were open to reveal rows of lozenge-shaped glass gems in shades of blue and purple, alternating with casts in shades of pink and red, all ringed with gold-colored bands. They looked inviting and almost edible, like the wares of a high-end confectionery shop. In a backlit case, ten of the recovered gems were displayed, none bigger than a fingernail. I squinted at them through a magnifying glass. There was a glass cameo of a fat-cheeked Cupid, from which part of a wing had broken off, and a glass intaglio that showed Jupiter in the form of an eagle abducting Ganymede; described in a label as a “waster,” it was slightly miscast, and had been discarded as trash by its antique maker. These were hardly the finest products of antiquity, and under ordinary circumstances would never have been in a British Museum display cabinet. A placard explained their unusual path to prominence. It was striking to think about how much trouble had been caused by such tiny objects, and about how deceptively inconsequential they might once have seemed, lying hidden away in the museum’s strong rooms in their multitudinous quantity.
A different case showed some of Townley’s more distinguished gems—examples that had never gone missing. One was a fragment of what had in antiquity been a much larger cameo of a female figure in profile. The fragment was carved from onyx marked with bands that its creator had cunningly incorporated into the rendering of the subject’s hair. It was beautiful and mysterious, and the fact that it had been set in gold indicated that its eighteenth-century owner had thought so, too. I remembered something Gradel had told me the last time we spoke: that among the objects he had bought, or considered buying, which he now suspected came from the Townley collection were two very fine gem fragments that, on examination, he had determined to be eighteenth-century fakes. Gradel then noted that Townley, unlike most aristocratic collectors—who craved the biggest and best and most intact gems—had a taste for fragments. “These two fragments were clearly intended to deceive,” Gradel went on. “In normal commercial terms, it didn’t make sense to make them. It only makes sense if you imagine that they were made for one particular client who was known to appreciate and love fragments—namely, Charles Townley.”
Gradel respected this facet of Townley’s connoisseurship, he went on, because he shared it. “I actually prefer a fragment to a complete gem,” he told me. “With complete pieces you are told everything, and it’s too easy. Whereas if you only have a tiny fragment, it’s like doing a crossword puzzle. You have to argue, to research, and to reconstruct the entire object.” To have only a tiny sliver of evidence from which to figure out the whole story, Gradel concluded, was “a gorgeous intellectual challenge.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/13/the-british-museums-blockbuster-scandals
