Ancient gold ewer returned to Turkey

A 4,250-year-old gold ewer looted in Anatolia has just been returned to Turkey by the Gilbert Collection, which is housed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The ewer had been acquired in 1989 by Arthur Gilbert from a Los Angeles dealer who is now known to have handled illicit antiquities.

The collection of Arthur Gilbert, a British-born American property developer, initially went on display at Somerset House in 2000, a year before his death. In 2009 it was moved to a dedicated gallery in the V&A, on long-term loan from the Gilbert Trust for the Arts.

The collection comprises European decorative art crafted of gold, silver or micromosaics, so the Anatolian ewer, dating from around 2,250 BC, is very much an anomaly as the only antiquity. For this reason, and not because of any provenance concerns, it was never displayed in the V&A’s Gilbert gallery.

The price paid by Gilbert for the ewer was around $250,000, a substantial sum at the time. It is among the most important of the 1,200 items in the collection, The Art Newspaper reported.