Last week, when news broke that a senior British Museum staffer had been laid off in connection with reported missing objects from the museum collection, that employee has been named as Peter John Higgs, who was curator of Greek collections and sculpture. A week later, the British Museum’s director Hartwig Fischer, ho has already announced that he will step down in 2024, has now departed the museum with immediate effect.
The Telegraph in London reports that Higgs allegedly sold the stolen objects on eBay for small sums of money. Investigations by the Metropolitan police and the British Museum are underway to ascertain why the curator offered the items for sale online, for what journalist Tom Seymour has described as not ‘enough to buy a meal out at Pizza Express’. Some of the valuables were estimated to be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
Higgs’s username on eBay was ‘Sultan1966’, and his account was linked to his Twitter feed, which included his name and job title. The Telegraph published screenshots of an early Roman Imperial cameo made of onyx, dating from the first or second century and listed on his page for £40. The official British Museum collection entry for the object on its site lists it as ‘not on display’ with ‘images not available’.
As the story developed, Fischer, has said in a statement that the museum ‘apologises for what has happened’. This week evidence was released showing that Dutch antiquities dealer Ittai Gradel had alerted the museum about the sales of objects, recognising at least 70 works on eBay that may have come from the London institution’s collection. Fischer has now apologised for misjudged remarks about Gradel’s attempts to warn museum hierarchy as early as 2021.
Before stepping down, Fischer announced the British Museum was determined to put things right. ‘We have already tightened our security arrangements and we are working alongside outside experts to complete a definitive account of what is missing, damaged and stolen. This will allow us to throw our efforts into the recovery of objects.’ Art historian Dr. Bendor Grosvenor has pointed out that the kinds of objects Higgs attempted to sell are rarely attributable, meaning that once they end up on the black market it becomes practically impossible to trace them back.
