With a Gift of Art, a Daughter Honors, if Not Absolves, Her Father

Douglas Latchford, a scholar of Khmer antiquities who was accused of trafficking in looted artifacts, bequeathed his world-class collection to his daughter. She has returned it to Cambodia.

Nawapan Kriangsak found out as a young girl that running in her father’s apartment was forbidden. Her father, Douglas A.J. Latchford, was perhaps the world’s leading collector of Cambodian antiquities and every corner of his apartment in Bangkok featured a statue of a Khmer deity too valuable to risk to horseplay.

When she went to bed as a child, Ms. Kriangsak said in an interview, the brooding stone faces would haunt her. “Daddy,” she would tell him, “they walk at night.”

Last summer, when her father died at 88, they all became hers — 125 works that make up what is said to be the greatest private collection of artifacts from Cambodia’s 1,000-year-old Khmer Dynasty.

In full: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/arts/design/cambodia-artifacts-douglas-latchford.html

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