About the collection
The collection of Roman clay lamps still reflects August Kestner's personality. Among the lamps offered to him in large numbers at the time, he selected with connoisseurship all the important lamp types, but above all all all the known thematic groups of the relief depictions on the lamp mirrors. His lamps - there are 330 of them - document the developments and changes in forms and representations within the large time span from early Greek times to late antiquity.
The acquisition of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing's collection of Egyptian art in 1935 brought a significant enrichment to the lamp collection with a further 107 lamps from the period of Roman Egypt. But the collection also grew in size and importance through individual acquisitions and occasional donations. (U. Gehrig, preface to the catalogue "Die antiken Tonlampen im Kestner-Museum Hannover", 1993, p. 9)