GLR March-April 2023

The Warren Cup and Me ART MEMO

D AVID G AULD I FIRST ENCOUNTERED the Warren Cup in 2006 at the British Museum. It is a 1st-century CE Græco-Roman silver goblet with homoerotic images. A college friend had seen it previously at the Metro politan Museum of Art in New York, but knew that the British Museum had acquired it. He was eager to have me see its explicit depiction of male-on-male sex acts. We found the six-inch-high cup prominently displayed in the Wolfson Gallery on the third level. It is remarkable to see homosexuality rep resented in a major public museum, and prominently displayed rather than hidden in a “Secretum,” as the British Museum did with all such materials until 1953. Furthermore, this is an object of

Harvard. Ned and his brothers all went to Harvard and left legacies there and else where in and around Boston. Also, as a young man struggling with my own sexual ity, I would have appreciated knowing I had a relative who lived an openly gay life a century before. After receiving his B.A. at Harvard, Ned studied classics at New College, Oxford. There he met his lifelong companion, John Marshall. As art collectors they built the classical collections at the MFA in Boston and at the Met. In 1888, they moved to gether to a large house in Lewes, England, near Brighton, where they created a salon of men interested in art and antiquities. Ned acquired the Warren Cup in 1911 from a dealer in Rome shortly after it was excavated near Jerusalem. The cup may have come from Pompeii and been taken to Jerusalem during the Roman occupation. Ned

and texts of the period. In his analysis of the clothing and hairstyles, Clarke concludes that Side B depicts a Roman citizen as the insertive partner of a young slave. The higher-status partner taking an active role sexually would have made this socially ac ceptable in ancient Rome. However, the scene on the A side is more problematical for Clarke, because the partners appear to be equals in age and status, which would not have been normative in Rome. For him, this contradiction was all the more reason for further study. John Pollini continued this analysis six years later in his article about the Warren Cup, also in The Art Bulletin . He concluded that both sides depict pæderastic relation ships between freeborn males: a young male with a boy just after puberty (side B) and an older male with a young male just before the age of citizenship (side A). As such, they are paradigms representing two ends of a spectrum acceptable in ancient Greece and Rome. Pollini further speculates that the cup was one of a pair, and that the other cup may have shown heterosexual couplings. Ned would undoubtedly have preferred Pollini’s interpretation. He wrote a book ti tled A Defence of Uranian Love that was published under a pseudonym after his death. In it, he makes an argument for same-sex relationships based on those prevalent in Ancient Greece, in which an older male mentors a younger one and may or may not have sexual relations with him. It is easy to understand how the Warren Cup was his “Holy Grail,” as he called it. In a British Museum publication about the Warren Cup, archaeologist Dyfri Williams wrote: “The Warren Cup has in troduced us to some of the complexities sur rounding the understanding of sexuality in antiquity, while its modern fate has pointed up some of the ways in which attitudes to sexuality have changed over the last cen tury.” Indeed, discomfort with this subject matter may also have been the reason I was n’t told about my family history. Ned advocated for the acceptance of ho mosexuality in his time by describing how it had been practiced in Ancient Greece and Rome. There is no evidence that he ever en gaged in acts of pædophilia. I prefer to think of Ned as one who tried to live an authentic life in spite of the social norms of his day. The Warren Cup, which bears my distant cousin’s name, is a legacy of his per sonal courage in living such a life. David Gauld is an architect based in New York City. He is Ned Warren’s first cousin four times removed.

extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship. The images are in relief, hammered out from the inside rather than formed in a mold— a technique known as re poussé . I was duly im pressed, but I had no idea of my family connection to this ancient artifact. The Warren Cup was named for its original modern-day owner, Ed ward “Ned” Perry War

kept this object in his personal collection his entire life. After his death in 1928, the cup had a complicated provenance due to its controversial imagery. Ned’s former secretary inherited it and tried unsuccessfully to sell it. In the 1950’s, it was once refused entry into the U.S. because it was considered obscene. Several museums, including the British Museum, were approached but declined to buy it. The cup

ren. I recently discovered that I was related to him. Ned was the third son of Samuel Dennis Warren, the Gilded Age paper baron who founded S. D. Warren Company in 1871. This Westbrook, Maine, paper mill was once the largest in the world. S. D. War ren was my fourth great uncle, and both my great-great-grandfather and my great-grand father had managed the mill. My father was working at the mill when I was born. Although Ned was a first cousin, four times removed, growing up I never learned about him or any of his siblings. I think this was intentional. Our side of the family man aged the mill; S. D.’s heirs profited from it. Ned had lived openly with his male lover. He sued his brother Samuel over manage ment of the family trust. This lawsuit was thought to be a primary reason that Samuel shot and killed himself. These stories didn’t fit the family narrative that my father and his siblings wanted to pass down to us. I am disappointed that I didn’t know more about S. D. Warren’s family while growing up. There were so many missed connections, particularly during my years at

Ned Warren, 1890.

changed hands among a few private collec tors until 1999, when the British Museum decided to purchase it to prevent the cup from leaving the country again. The price was £1.8 million, at that time the largest amount the museum had ever paid for a sin gle acquisition. Just as my family’s embarrassment may have prevented me from learning about my gay relative, society’s discomfort with same-sex relations temporarily kept this his torically significant artifact out of the public eye. Furthermore, scholarly analysis of such imagery in Ancient Roman art was scarce. One of the first articles to address this paucity was John R. Clarke’s analysis of the Warren Cup for The Art Bulletin in 1993. Clarke describes the two scenes of love making in detail, referring to them as Side A and Side B, and provides historical context. He compares the cup’s sexual subject matter to other objects, architectural decorations,

The G & LR

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