Kneeling Attendants

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Object or Group Name

Kneeling Attendants

Case Summary

The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned these two 10th century Khmer Kneeling Attendants to Cambodia in 2013.

The Kneeling Attendants came to the Met in a series of gifts that began in 1987 when the British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford and the London auction house Spink & Son joined in donating one of the two heads.

A second head was donated by collectors Raymond G. and Milla Louise Handley in 1989. The couple had bought it two years earlier, also at Spink. In 1992, Latchford gave the museum two torsos that matched the heads. In 1993 the two heads and bodies were reattached by museum conservators, restoring the two sculptures.

In 2012, Cambodian authorities uncovered evidence that both sculptures had been looted from the temple of Prasat Chen in the Koh Ker complex in northern Cambodia. The evidence included photographs of the statue’s broken-off bases, which were left behind at the site by looters, and witness statements suggesting that the statues were intact at the site as recently as 1970.

The negotiations over the statues, which began in June 2012, culminated with a trip by Sharon Cott, the Met’s general counsel, and John Guy, its Southeast Asia curator, to Cambodia in March 2013. The Met announced its decision to return both Kneeling Attendants in May of that year, one year after Cambodia's request. The sculptures were among the first in a wave of returns of objects looted from Koh Ker.

“Admittedly these things were moonlighted out of Cambodia and wound up somewhere else," Latchford told the New York Times in an interview. "But had they not been, they would likely have been shot up for target practice by the Khmer Rouge.”

In fact, Latchford had worked for years with former members of the genocidal regime to traffic the statues out of Cambodia. In 2019, he was criminally indicted in New York's Southern District for running a decades long trafficking network that plundered Cambodia's ancient temples with the help for former Khmer Rouge soldiers.

Number of Objects

2

Object Type

Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Culture

Khmer

Private Collector

Raymond G. and Milla Louise Handley

Museum Name

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museum Accession Number

#1: MMA1987.410 and 1992.390.1
#2: MMA1989.1 and 1992.390.2

Receiving Country

Cambodia

MOLA Contributor(s)

Jason Felch

Peer Reviewed By

Damien Huffer

Citation

“Kneeling Attendants,” Museum of Looted Antiquities, accessed November 4, 2024, https://mola.omeka.net/items/show/1127.

Geolocation