A Danish Whistleblower Spots Townsley Items on eBay

 


Taylor Dafoe, ' The Employee Who Allegedly Stole Artifacts From the British Museum Has Been Identified as a Senior Curator of Greek and Roman Art' Artnet News August 18, 2023

According to this article:

"An unnamed antiquities expert cited by the Telegraph said that he started spotting semi-precious gems and glass items listed for sale on the e-commerce site in 2016 or earlier. He recognized the pieces from the Townley collection of Graeco-Roman artifacts given to the British Museum in the early 19th century. The eBay seller’s name was “sultan1966”—the same handle Higgs used on Twitter at the time. When contacted by the expert, the seller denied any connection to Higgs. The antiquities expert said he informed the British Museum of the eBay listings in June of 2020. Higgs has reportedly denied the allegations."

What is interesting is that you can see from the calculation of postage in the above screenshot from August 2016 that the viewer was in Denmark. So who in Denmark would be familiar enough with the Townley Collection to have spotted this? And why, when they did, did they wait (we are told) until 2020 to inform the museum? Note there seem to be at least two other "sultan1966"s on the internet, active on several collectors' sites.  

From the BM webpage:

Charles Townley (1737-1805) inherited Townley Hall, Lancs in 1758 and began building an outstanding collection of antiquities on his grand tour seven years later. He returned from Italy in 1774 and lived in Whitehall until his purchase in 1777 of Park Street House, Westminster (later 14 Queen Anne's Gate), when he installed his collection there.

But there is another twist in this story, as Jason Felch notes, the Twitter account that reportedly linked Peter Higgs to the eBay sales by "Sultan1966" does not appear to be authentic, but some kind of a bot account. If this is the evidence that the BM is using, it smells a bit fishy. Also the Twitter account is written with a capital S, the eBay account with a lower case s (unusual, that would be, in the case of somebody with Higgs' education, no?).  

The  Art Newspaper is making the claim that according to anonymous British Museum staff, the museum's director, Hartwig Fischer, was forced to resign as a result of the discovery of a series of alleged thefts from the institution, with calls for him to step down immediately. The Telegraph adds that other members of BM staff such as Deputy Director Jonathan Williams, are under scrutiny given "correspondence dating to February 2021 in which Mr Williams was alerted to the thefts" and then BM inaction "led to 'two wasted years' in which opportunities to recover stolen items might have been lost." So was the Museum alerted in 2020, or 2021? Does one get the feeling that the release of different pieces of information to different journalists at different times is intended to create an information smokescreen or fog? No, no no... this is the British Museum, and there should be full transparency, let the world see what these people have been up to. AS Chasing Aphrodite author Jason Felch notes:

"To maintain any credibility the British Museum urgently needs to explain these thefts, and the museum's delayed response to them, to the public and British government – and not hide behind an on-going criminal investigation that should have started several years ago."

UPDATE 18.8.2023

Chasing Aphrodite @ChasingAphrodit · 38 min
We now know the name of the whistleblower: Dr Ittai Gradel, a Danish expert in Roman antiquities:
'I alerted the British Museum on 28 February 2021. I was….not pleased with the reaction or lack of reaction that I had from them.' http://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…