Henry Salt
1780–1827 · English painter, draughtsman and diplomat
Henry Salt (1780 - 1827) was an English painter, draughtsman, diplomat and Egyptologist whose fame rests mainly on his post as Consul General in Egypt, where he gathered antiquities for the British Museum. His work matters because his fieldwork and his rivalries with other consuls mark an early stage in British Egyptology.
After training in London under Joseph Farington and John Hoppner, he gave up portrait painting without building a lasting reputation. In 1802 he became secretary and draughtsman to George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, and accompanied him to India, Ceylon, the Cape and Abyssinia. The trip left behind his drawings, published as Twenty-four Views, and an account of his travels in Ethiopia.
He arrived in Egypt in 1816 as Consul General, with the task of securing antiquities for the British Museum. To do so he cultivated good relations with the pasha Mehmet Ali. He competed with the French consul Bernardino Drovetti, and the two reached an informal agreement dividing the sites: monuments east of the Nile would go to France, those to the west to Britain. Salt relied on Giovanni Battista Belzoni, an agent who assembled his first collection, which included the head of Ramesses II and was sold to the British Museum.
His later collections had uneven fates. The second, of 4,014 objects, was turned down by the museum in London because of its price. It included the sarcophagus of Ramesses III, which Champollion saw at Livorno and which Charles X of France bought in 1826 for £10,000 for the Louvre. A third collection of 1,083 pieces was bought at auction by the British Museum in 1835.
Salt sponsored excavations at Thebes and Abu Simbel and carried out archaeological research at the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx. He learned to decipher hieroglyphs with Champollion, and in 1825 he published an essay on the systems of Young and Champollion. He died at Desouk on 30 October 1827, aged 47. His name also survives in the botanical abbreviation "Salt", used to cite him as an authority on plant classification.