送交者: 田牛 于 2004-12-30, 22:59:25:
回答: 还是不明白祖大寿的墓葬是怎么落户异国的。 由 jxh 于 2004-12-30, 22:21:40:
博物馆也知道George Crofts搞了乌龙：This lot was supposed to be from the tomb of a Ming dynasty official, but it was bought from China in 1919 or 1920 by George Crofts, who didn't exactly do all his research. The museum info indicated that there was a good chance this set of artifacts was from the grave complexes of two or more individuals.
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The Royal Ontario Museum's internationally-renowned Chinese collections are considered among the finest in the world outside of China. The great strengths of the collections are its ceramic pottery and tomb figurines, Bronze Age material and Buddhist arts. The Chinese collections are notable for their size, 70,000 objects, and their diversity of character, from oracle bones used by diviners to ceramic pillows where ordinary folk could rest their heads. Although the Chinese Bronze Age material clearly dominates, the Far Eastern Department's collections also encompass objects from Afghanistan to Japan.
The story of how the ROM's Chinese collections began reflects some of the exciting circumstances which characterized international archaeology at the beginning of this century. The first objects acquired for the Chinese collections were two ceramic pieces purchased in Egypt by ROM founder and Egyptologist, Dr. Charles Trick Currelly. These two Han dynasty pots awakened Currelly's interest to an area far from his usual specialty. Between 1909 and 1913, when the Museum opened, Currelly made extensive purchases of Chinese art objects on the London market.
In 1918, George Crofts, a British fur merchant with extensive commercial interests in Beijing and Tianjin (Tientsin), visited Toronto. In the lobby of his hotel he spotted a postcard which featured a large ceramic sculpture which he had acquired in China and sent on to a London dealer. Identified as part of the ROM's collections, Crofts promptly visited the Museum and left his card. He was contacted later that day by Dr. Currelly, now the first Director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology. Curfelly secured the services of Crofts for the Museum and, between 1918 and 1925, Crofts sent hundreds of cases of Chinese art to Toronto. He brought the Museum its main holdings of Chinese ceramics, tomb figurines, paintings, sculpture and textiles.
Crofts' shipments continued and he sent the Museum over 150 cases filled with antiquities between June, 1919 and December. 1921. Further shipments followed over the next four years, but Crofts' contributions declined after I922 and he died several years later.
However, another link to China soon presented itself to Currelly. Bishop W. C. White was appointed the first Anglican Bishop of Henan Province and, as a Torontonian, Currelly considered him a natural candidate to take over the acquisitions program for the Museum.
Between 1925 and 1930, White sent a few thousand artifacts to the ROM, including Shang and Zhou dynasty bronzes and ceramics, Han tomb tiles, and (three) major Yuan dynasty wall paintings. White later became a scholar and teacher of Chinese art and, in 1934, was appointed the first keeper of the ROM's Far Eastern Collections, as well as the first Professor of Chinese at the University of Toronto.
It was through Bishop White that a third main benefactor to the Chinese collections became associated with the Museum: Dr. J. M. Menzies, a scholar who served as a missionary of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in Henan Province. In 1938, White brought Menzies to the ROM as a Research Assistant. The Menzies Collection of Shang dynasty oracle bones, bronzes, and ceramics now forms an important and unusual part of the ROM's Chinese holdings.