An undescribed Athenian Funeral Monument

Extract

Visiting last year the house of Mons. des Tombes, an accomplished amateur and collector of pictures at the Hague, I observed over a chimney-piece a small sculptured relief in marble, of which the Grecian lineaments contrasted forcibly enough with the taste of the Dutch paintings that surrounded it. In answer to my inquiries, the owner informed me that he had seen this piece of antiquity one day in the hands of a countryman, covered with paint and about to be broken up, and that he had rescued it from destruction, and after cleaning the surface caused it to be placed where I then saw it. How it originally came into the hands in which he found it, or into Holland at all, he had been unable to learn. At my suggestion M. des Tombes had a cast of the work made, a copy of which he has been so good as to present to the new Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge. From that cast the present illustration (Pl. XXXIX) is taken.