Provenance Information

The work was donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Joseph Hatzenbuehler, Houston, Texas, in 2009. Mr. Hatzenbuehler acquired the ring in 2006 from Wolfgang Wilhelm, a dealer or agent in Germany. The seller to Mr. Wilhelm was the Daphne Collection Inc., Liechtenstein and Seychelles, which provided a written statement stating that it had owned the ring since 1988, and purchased it from Karl Albrecht Frickhinger of Germany (b. 1924- d. 2003), a fossil specialist, publisher, archaeologist, who had acquired the work in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s.

Exhibition Information

None.

Publication Information

None.

Section of the AAMD Guidelines relied upon for the exception to 1970

Informed judgement that works were outside of the country of modern discovery before 1970

Explain why the object fits the exception set forth above

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has provenance information for this work back to the 1960s but has not been able to substantiate this provenance because it has not been able to confirm the information provided by the Daphne Collection, Inc. The work is one of the most opulent Celtic rings to survive and it fills a significant gap in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of early European material. Coincidentally, the type of decoration on the ring seems to be partly inspired by Etruscan gold rings of the early 5th century B.C. and The Metropolitan Museum of Art has in its collection a likely prototype.