Attic Vases in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

A growing interest in the study of archaeology has led in recent years to very substantial developments in the several collections of antiquities in Australia and New Zealand. Pottery has perhaps made the greatest contribution to this expansion, and the total amount of available material here has reached a point at which definitive publication in the Corpus Vasorum has become well worth while. Provision for this has already been made, but in the meantime it seemed to me that some account of the Attic vases in this part of the world might be of service and interest to scholars, since our collections by reason of their remoteness are not well known, although they contain several distinguished pieces, including a few which have been lost to sight for some time. For the sake of brevity, and because they are likely to be of wider interest, I confine myself here to Attic black-figure, red-figure and white-ground.The main Australian collection of Greek vases is housed in the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. The nucleus of this collection was acquired, some 90 years ago, by Sir Charles Nicholson, Chancellor of Sydney University from 1854 to 1862, during his travels in Italy and was catalogued by Miss Louisa Macdonald in 1898. Considerable additions have since been made by gift or purchase, as may be seen from a comparison between the vases listed by Miss Macdonald and those mentioned in the second edition of the Handbook to the Nicholson Museum, published fifty years later.