The People: Collectors |
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Joel van Bussel is a collector and anthropologist. He was working in the Melanesian island of New Britain in 1983 when he came across a large-scale and dramatic ceremony being performed by the people of the village of Uvol on the south-east coast. He documented and photographed the whole series of events and later acquired 75 of the dance crests.
Through the dealer Kevin Conru, many were acquired by museums: 25 by the National Museum & Art Gallery in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, of which New Britain is a part; others went to the Horniman Museum. Six were bought by RAMM with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund.
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Lady Neville gave an important collection of Australian artefacts to the museum in 1920. The objects, including a large assemblage of boomerangs, had been collected in the 1860s by her father David Lloyd Jones while working in Queensland. The details of Mr Lloyd Jones life there are still being investigated.
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Leopold Agar Denys Montague was born in Pennsylvania, Exeter. Throughout his life he played a prominent part in local affairs. He collected antiquities, mainly Greek, Roman and Ancient Egyptian: many of these are on display in the section on Ancient Mediterranean Civilisations. He also collected many important ethnographic items, from dealers, auction houses, friends, relatives and other collectors.
He published "Weapons and Implements of Savage Races" in 1921 which contained information and anecdotes about his collections. A large number of these were given to the museum in 1953 by his nieces, including the fine Maori canoe model and New Guinea ancestor figure.
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The Museum received a collection of nearly one hundred items from "R. Waterfield, Esq" in 1945. Apart from the fact that he lived in Teignmouth, no further information on this person was recorded at the time. The bulk of the items in the gift were collected in Burma and China, but objects from North and South America, East Africa and Polynesia were also included.
Research is now being undertaken to try to find more information about him. (If any one has any information about people with this name who lived in Teignmouth in the 1940s, please let the museum know).
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