T}his page gives a summary of the conclusions that can be drawn when the details are considered of the lots that were sold at the first day of a four-day auction at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge in London [1-4 June 1883] of objects from Alessandro Palma di Cesnola and Edwin Henry Lawrence's collection. These details were taken from a hand-annotated Sothebys auctioneer's listing. Copies of these are held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford though in fact the following table was compiled from a copy obtained via the British Museum.

We are very grateful to Thomas Kiely from the British Museum for sending us a copy of the annotated sale catalogue.

Firstly the following table shows a summary of all the bids:

From this it can be seen that Pitt-Rivers is mid-table in many respects.

For example, he is behind Lincoln and Pearson in terms of successful bids, in fact he achieves almost half their strike-rate. They both seem to have been dealers so perhaps this is not surprising.

Largest number of successful bids:

The rest are 7 bids or less

Both Lincoln and Pearson also managed to buy more objects (not unexpectedly):

Largest number of objects bought:

However, Pitt-Rivers does manage to spend more than Pearson, who as we have seen actually manages to obtain almost twice the number of objects, and get nearly half as many again successful bids.

Sums of money spent:

Single largest successful bid: Lincoln for lot 29 for £3.9.0, next highest Pitt-Rivers for lot 76 for £3.00

Single lowest successful bid: Pearson lot 175 for 1 shilling

Of course, auctions are not necessarily about amount of money spent, or how successful you are at bidding, but whether you can successfully bid for the objects you want, and spend the amount of money you think the object is worth. We will never know if Pitt-Rivers felt that he had achieved this on the 1st June 1883 when he stood in Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge's saleroom and bidded for a long series of Cesnola-excavated, Lawrence-sold artefacts.

AP April 2012