Eduard Gaffron

Carl Eduard Gaffron (born November 26, 1861 in Lippstadt ; † March 27, 1931 in Berlin ) was a German ophthalmologist and one of the most important collectors of pre-Columbian art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Eduard Gaffron followed his brother, the merchant Hermann Adolph Gaffron, to Peru in 1892 . In Lima he opened one of the country's first specialized ophthalmological practices. In 1900 he married Johanne Hedwig Elise Emilie von Gevekot, with whom he had two children. In the course of his 20-year stay in Peru, he collected over 11,000 objects from various pre-Columbian cultures. Central to his collection network was the Club Germania in Lima, which he had headed as director since 1903. In 1912 Gaffron returned to Germany and settled in Berlin , where he died in 1931.

Parts of the Gaffron collection can be found in numerous museums around the world, including the Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig , the Museum Five Continents , the Lippisches Landesmuseum , the Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg or the British Museum in London .

Eduard Gaffron was the father of the biochemist Hans Gaffron .

literature

• Victòria Solanilla Demestre: The ceramics of the Moche culture in the collections of the Lippe State Museum . Nünnerich-Asmus-Verlag, 2019.
• Claudia Schmitz: The Peruvian collection of Eduard Gaffron in the Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig and its significance for research history , in: Yearbook of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony , Volume 43, 2007, pp. 111–127.
• Claudia Schmitz: Gifts from the ancestors - Peruvian treasures from the Eduard Gaffron collection - Construction and reality of a culture. Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig, 2001.