Portrait Head of a Priest

A head of a man, carved from pale cream limestone. Clear, deeply incised lines delineate the thin, gently curved lips, straight aquiline nose, and large almond eyes under a knitted brow. He sports the flat-topped cylindrical headdress, or modius, worn by Palmyrene priests. A wreath runs around the base of the modius, flanking a central medallion enclosing a small figural bust, most likely representing one of the priest’s predecessors or ancestors. The additional adornment of the modius suggests that this figure may have held an elevated rank within the priesthood. It has been speculated that the modius would have been made of a kind of felt ((like a tarbush or ‘fez’). It covers the priest’s hair, which would probably have been kept shaved. The laurel wreath is a feature not present in Palmyrene sculpture until c. 130-140 A.D., supporting the dating of this head to the late 2nd century A.D..

Palmyrene funerary portraiture is now recognised as the largest corpus of Roman portraiture outside of Rome. Prof. Rubina Raja, head of the Palmyrene Portrait Project, has stressed the importance of status over individual likeness within Palmyrene funerary sculpture. Of the more than 3,000 extant Palmyrene sculptures, around ten percent depict priests. The number of depictions suggests the prestige accorded to priests in Palmyrene society; suitable candidates for the position were chosen only from the city’s leading families. The polytheistic religion of ancient Palmyra encompassed the gods of the northwestern Semitic pantheon, as well as others from Mesopotamian and Arab societies. The chief deity was known as Bol, or Bel after 217 B.C. – the god of fertility, weather, and war known as Baal in northwestern Semitic practices. The pantheon comprised another sixty ancestral gods of the Palmyrene clans, including deities unique to Palmyra and to other regions in the Levantine.

Palmyra was established sometime in the third century B.C. and soon grew to be a city of major importance, due to its location on two of the most important trade routes in the ancient world: the Silk Road to China, and the route between the Far East and India and the head of the Persian Gulf. Although it began as a Mesopotamian settlement, Palmyra was run successively by the Arameans, the Arabs, and the Romans between the first centuries B.C. and A.D.. In the second century A.D., the Persians conquered the city, but the original site was destroyed in 273 A.D. by the Roman emperor Aurelian. The Romans and the Byzantines held the city for the next 400 years, rebuilding it and establishing it as a Christian city. The  architectural and artistic style of the Palmyrenes reflects the shifting cultural landscape of the city, combining Greco-Roman, Persian, and Arabian influences. Situated as it was between the two great empires of Rome and Parthia, its languages, society and religion, its art and architecture speak of a rich and varied heritage, a unique synthesis of East and West that continues to fascinate and inspire scholarly research.

Antiquities and Oriental Art: The Thomas Barlow Walker Collection, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 26-29 September 1972, Lot 302.
Antiquities Auction, Harmer, Rooke Numismatists, Ltd., New York, 19 September 1973, Lot 166.
Antiquities and Islamic Art, Sotheby’s, New York, 20 June 1990, Lot 112 (published with no provenance given).
Olympia Bobou, Amy C. Miranda, Rubina Raja, and Jean-Baptiste Yon, The Ingholt Archive: The Palmyrene Material, Transcribed with Commentary and Bibliography, Vol. 2 (Turnhout, 2022), p. 690.
The Devoted Classicist: The Private Collection of a New York Antiquarian, Christie’s, New York, 6 October 2022, Lot 19 (published with only the 1990 sale recorded as provenance).
 

Most likely with Azeez Khayat (1875-1943), New York, by circa 1909.
Private Collection of Thomas Barlow Walker (1840-1928), Minneapolis, most likely acquired from the above been 1909 and 1926, and by at least 1928, and kept at 803 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis. Collection number #426.
Consigned to the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, by the above between 1927 and 1928, until 1972. Recorded in Ingholt Archive, PS 716. The archival record and photograph were most likely created by at least 1944 – a 1944 letter by art historian Karl Lehmann notes that Ingholt was supplied with photographs of the Walker’s Palmyrene sculptures (letter in the Walker Art Center Archives).
Sold at: Antiquities and Oriental Art: The Thomas Barlow Walker Collection, Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 26-29 September 1972, Lot 302. Accompanied by confirmation that #426 corresponds to Lot 302 from the Registrar’s file for this sale.
U.S.A. art market, by at least 1990.
Sold at: Antiquities and Islamic Art, Sotheby’s, New York, 20 June 1990, Lot 112.
Private Collection of Bassam Alghanim (b. 1952), New York, acquired from the above and kept in the James F.D. Lanier House, New York City, until 2022.
ALR: S00248710, with IADAA Certificate, this item has been checked against the Interpol database.

Azeez Khayat (1875-1943) was born in Tyre, Lebanon (then Ottoman Syria) on 1 January 1875. An amateur archaeologist, he excavated sites in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Greece, and became a renowned antiquities dealer who sold pieces to collectors and museums alike. His office in Tyre was near ancient ruins that were rich in antiquities, seals, cylinders, and coins. Khayat emigrated to New York through Ellis Island in 1893, becoming a United States citizen in December 1898. Khayat used the small collection of ancient glass he brought with him to establish a client base for his new business on Rector Street, in the neighbourhood known as Little Syria in Lower Manhattan. Khayat frequently returned to Lebanon, and was able to bring many more artefacts, often excavated by his own workmen, to the U.S.. He opened a gallery on West Eleventh Street, and later moved to 366 Fifth Avenue, opposite the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He held his first public auction of antiquities on 12-13 February 1903, at The Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, initially intending to sell via annual auctions, but beginning to hold multiple sales per year from 1905. Khayat also sold items via other auction houses and auctioneers, such as Thomas E. Kirby and Anderson Galleries. From 1911 onwards, Khayat also sold antiquities directly from his shop on Fifth Avenue. He would continue his practice of travelling to the Middle East, Greece, and Europe, to acquire new objects to sell in the U.S. for decades.

After a long and successful career as an art dealer, Khayat moved to Haifa in Israel, where he bought a large stretch of land on the beach. He developed this land into a popular resort known as Khayat Beach, while two of his daughters remained in New York to run his gallery.

Khayat seems to have been Thomas Barlow Walker’s primary source for Palmyrene sculpture. In 1906, Porter and Torrey published a Palmyrene Aramaic inscription that they received as a plaster cast from Azeez Khayat. The original piece featuring the inscription is one that was later in the Walker collection, and is now in the collection of Universität Erlangen (Archäologische Sammlung, inv. no. I 1184). According to his invoices, Walker purchased one Palmyrene stone bas relief from Khayat in December 1905, and two more in January 1908. These reliefs are discussed in a series of letters between Walker and Khayat, sent between September 1907 and January 1908, in which Khayat explains that these reliefs were excavated from the ruins of Palmyra in spring 1906. Khayat also supplied Walker with other pieces, such as a Roman marble head now in the Getty Villa, California (74.AA.63). Khayat also sold Palmyrene sculpture to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Zenas Crane (six reliefs which are now in the Berkshire Museum of Art, Pittsfield, MA), and perhaps to Hermann Oelrichs of Newport, RI (four reliefs which are now in the Yale University Art). It is therefore very likely that Walker acquired this Palmyrene, as well as his others, from Khayat.


Thomas Barlow Walker (1840-1928) was born in Xenia, Ohio in 1840. When Walker was nine years old, his father invested all of the family’s money into a wagon train of supplies and set off for the California gold mines. His father died in Missouri, losing the entire investment, meaning that Walker had to drop out of school to find work to support his family. His mother continued to educate her children herself, so well that Walker was able to enrol at Baldwin University in Berea, Ohio, in 1856. It was here that he met his future wife, Harriet Hulet, who he married in 1863. Although Walker could only afford to attend one term per year, he kept up with his studies and was offered the chair of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin while in his early twenties. Walker refused this position, however; while working to put himself through university, he had started working a number of jobs, including clerking in a store, obtaining lumber for railroad ties, and selling grindstones door to door. While trying to track down a misplaced shipment of grindstones in 1862, Walker went to Minneapolis, and within a day was hired by George Wright to survey land in northern Minnesota.

Walker used the knowledge he gained from his surveying work in the Minnesota pine forests to begin his career in the lumber market and convince investors to partner with him. In 1868, he formed his first logging company: Butler, Mills and Walker. Wisely, Walker pulled his money grom the company and paid off his debts before the Panic of 1873, so was in a very good position to reinvest when the economy recovered towards the end of that decade. He formed a second, larger, company called Camp and Walker, which expanded logging operations and purchased and built new mills across Minneapolis. Walker moved on to Walker and Akeley in 1887, and built logging railroads across Itasca County to the Red River in order to transport their lumber. In 1883, Walker founded his other firm, the Red River Lumber Company, with his sons. In 1889, Walker began purchasing California Pine in large quantities and establishing additional mills in that state. His businesses were so successful that Walker was one of the fifteen richest men on earth by the time he died in 1928.

Walker lived in Minneapolis from 1863, and became a patron of many different projects related to the growth and development of the city. He built the already renowned commercial market in Minneapolis into the best produce market in the country. He was also very involved in building the Minneapolis Public Library system, as a stock holder and generous contributor to the Athenaeum Library Association, and championing the opening of the library to the broader public as well as paying members. He achieved this second aim by purchasing many stocks and distributing them amongst local young people, lowering the price of stocks, and opening the reading room to the general public. Not satisfied with this, Walker advocated the formation of a free public library, and eventually achieved this when the City Library was opened in 1885. Walker was made President of the Library Board from the library’s founding until his death in 1928, and four-fifths of the art displayed there came from his personal collection.

Walker began collecting art in 1874, when he purchased a copy of Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington for the library of his home. He displayed his collection in fourteen dedicated rooms in his house at 803 Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, constructing additions to hold his large collection of paintings, porcelain, bronzes, jades, ancient and modern glass, carved crystals, ancient Chinese carved snuff-boxes, and ivory carvings. The collection was arranged in themed rooms, with paintings hung salon-style wall to ceiling on the walls, alongside classical sculpture and antique furniture. His collection was opened in 1879 for free viewings by the public, and hosted about 100,000 visitors each year. ‘He employed no art collection, being recognized as one of the world’s great experts.’ As his collection continued to grow, he decided to found his own museum at 1710 Lyndale Avenue South – the Walker Art Gallery. Some of Walker’s collection of sixteenth to nineteenth century religious art were also donated to and displayed at Hennepin United Methodist Church.

The Walker Art Gallery was opened in 1927, and was reorganised into the Walker Art Center in 1939, as it continues to operate today. The museum began to focus on collecting modern art from the 1940s onwards, under the patronage of Walker’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Gilbert Walker. Walker owned nine pieces of Palmyrene sculpture which were consigned to the Walker Art Gallery when it first opened. Several of these were featured in the gallery’s two exhibitions of ‘Classical Art from the T.B. Walker Collections’ in 1953 and 1954. All of Walker’s Palmyrene pieces were deaccessioned and sold at the 1972 Sotheby’s sale in order to raise funds for additional modern art purchases, in line with the Art Center’s new direction. The Walker Art Center continues to be a global leader in the contemporary art field.

Bassam Alghanim (b. 1952) is a Kuwaiti billionaire who inherited a stake in his father’s company, Alfghanim Industries. His interest in the art of the ancient Mediterranean and its modern revival was sparked through a childhood trip to Baalbek, Lebanon, with his parents – also great art collectors. The Roman ruins there introduced Alghanim to Roman art and architecture, which led him backwards through time to that of the Greeks and the Egyptians. With a designer’s eye, Alghanim displays his extensive collections in his grand residence, including his home in the James F.D. Lanier House in Manhattan. As well as antiquities, Alghanim collects works by artists such as Giovannie Paolo Panini and Antonio Canova, who drew upon the Classical tradition. He was also a generous sponsor of students and scholars looking to study antiquity, in particular donating large sums to universities in support of new media projects, such as 3D digitisation and reconstruction of ancient monuments. In this way, he hopes to inspire in others the awe he felt in Baalbek as a child.