To look for Lily Place is to peel back the bandages of a mummy. She was once, for a few incandescent years in the 1920s, seemingly everywhere—London, Paris, Cairo, New York, and Minneapolis. And always at the right time. She donated to Mia all the art and artifacts filling the corridor in the photo above from July 6, 1926, gathered during her travels in the Near East. They were exotic and strange. But now it’s Place who is enshrouded in mystery.
She was born into a real-estate fortune in Minnesota, and in the late 1800s moved with her family between Minneapolis and New York City. Then, apparently bewitched by the exotic like many other dilettantes of the time, an era of salon seances and parlor room mummy unwrappings, she headed to Egypt.
Mia, within a year of opening in 1915, had acquired a huge trove of Egyptian antiquities. Place took it upon herself to pile on. She was, as one chronicle of ancient art put it, “a prodigious shopper in the Suq.” She was single, up for adventure, a treasure hunter. She sent hundreds of amulets, figurines, and, yes, mummy cartonnages, or cases, home to Mia as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and, for unknown reasons, the Arizona State Museum, in Tucson.
When King Tut’s tomb was opened, in 1922, Place was wintering in Cairo. Her donations increased, and in 1925 Mia linked them to the global Egyptomania craze. “…Egyptian discoveries are in the news week by week; King Tut’s coffin is being examined. Attendance at museums has increased…new interest in antiquities….”
It wouldn’t last. In the 1950s, Mia director Richard Davis began quietly selling off Place’s donations, purging the museum’s antiquities in favor of modern art—more than 4,500 objects in all, often on the cheap and without good provenance. In the end, Davis would resign and Place’s legacy would be obscured. No photos of her exist in Mia’s archives and her collections have been scattered, decoupled from her name. Davis didn’t sell everything, but in any case Place didn’t live to see what became of her collection. She died in London in 1929, while the mania was still carrying on. Mia eulogized her in its Bulletin as one of the museum’s “most gracious and liberal benefactors.”