John Marshall: Dealer in Antiquities and Collector of Photographs

Abstract

For some years I have been trying to reconstruct the extensive and historically important photographic collections of the British School at Rome, one of which consists of28 boxes containing photographs of mainly antique sculpture. All that appeared to be known about this particular collection was that it had belonged to a dealer in sculpture. The photographs appeared not to belong with those of the art historian and archaeologist, the first authority writing in English on Roman sculpture, Mrs Arthur Strong (Eugénie Sellers) (1843–1943), who was Assistant Director of the British School at Rome from 1905 to 1925. I had become interested in her collections not long before and had thus wandered into the history of sculpture. I began to reassemble material from this dealer, which had migrated into other collections. At the same time, I became intrigued by the quantity of items marked ‘suspicious’ or ‘forgery’. Some time before, I had come across a wooden drawer containing file cards that turned out to be the annotated index to the photographs. On a dirt-stained piece of paper glued to the front of the drawer, in tiny letters, appeared the name ‘John Marshall’. I was later to find corroborating evidence in one of the boxes. This was a letter dated 9 April 1926, from Gisela M. A. Richter, Curator of Classical Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 1910 to 1948, to a Julius Epple of Switzerland. The letter referred to John Marshall as being the Metropolitan Museum's agent in Europe. Marshall was, I thought, no ordinary dealer. Another search delivered several boxes of glass plate negatives. It was as if John Marshall (1862–1928) had decided suddenly to wake up.1