Phyllis Williams Lehmann

Phyllis Williams Lehmann, PhD (Brooklyn 12 November 1912 — Haydonville, Massachusetts, 29 September 2004) [Biographical details are drawn from [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/16/national/16lehmann.html "New York Times", obituary of Phyllis Williams Lehmann, 16 October 2004] ] was an American classical archaeologist who specialised in the Samothrace temple complex, where she discovered a third statue of "Winged Victory" (1949) [The Hellenistic statue, of the second century BCE, found in three large sections, is conserved in the museum at the Samothrace site.] and recovered missing fingers of the hand of the famous "Winged Victory of Samothrace" at the Louvre. [She identified them in 1950, in a drawer at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; an Austrian team in the 1870s had recovered a Roman "Victory" in the 1870s, and the unidentified fingers, not part of that sculpture, had been stored and forgotten.]

Biography

Phyllis Williams received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1934. She first visited Samothrace in 1938, as a doctoral student on the New York University team led by Karl Lehmann. She was awarded her PhD in 1943 and married Lehmann the following year. She was assistant field director of the excavations at Samothrace 1948-1960 and acting director 1960-1965, and she remained closely involved with Samothrace for the rest of her career. She was a member of the faculty of Smith College from 1946 to 1978 and was Dean there from 1965 to 1970.

Among her publications are "The Pedimental Sculptures of the Hieron in Samothrace" (1962) and "Samothrace III: The Hieron," (1969), which was awarded the Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians in 1969.

In 1970 she retired to her home in Haydonville, Massachusetts, where she died in 2004.

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