Henry Christy - Collections and Legacy

Collections and Legacy

By his will Christy bequeathed his collections of modern objects to the nation; his archaeological collection went to the nation, but with the finds from excavations in France to be shared with the French Musée d'Archéologie Nationale, which was to get the most important pieces. He also left £5000 which established the Christy fund that allowed the British Museum to purchase many more artefacts; with a sum of money to be applied to public exhibition. As there was then no spare room at the British Museum, the trustees secured the suite of rooms at 118 Victoria Street, Westminster (in which Christy himself had lived) and here the collection was exhibited, under the care of A. W. Franks, until 1884. In that year the removal of the natural history department to South Kensington made room for the collection at the British Museum.

Christy had a partial catalogue of his collections made in 1862, by Carl Ludvig Steinhauer. In 1864 he wrote an account of the work which was being carried out at his expense in the Vézère Valley; these notices appeared in the Comptes rendus (29 February 1864) and Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (21 June 1864). They referred mainly to the "reindeer period", as the time of the cavemen in southern France then came to be styled. Christy's funding contributed to the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in 1868 in a cave near Les Eyzies. An account of the explorations appeared in a half-finished book left by Christy, entitled Reliquiae Aquilanicae, being contributions to the Archaeology and Paleontology of Perigord and the adjacent provinces of Southern France; this was completed by Christy's executors, first by Lartet and, after his death in 1870, by Rupert Jones.