Over 2,500 years after this aryballos was made, it found its way to an auction in the UK. It was bought by Henry Wellcome in 1928 fom 'Stevens' for £1.2.6. Wellcome was an avid collector of medical material, archaeology and ethnography. The majority of his collecting took place in London auction houses and he spent more each year on acquisitions than the British Museum!

His own museum in London concentrates on medical material, including ethnographic medical objects. With so many objects in storage, there was a desire to share them with other institutions around the country. By 1981 several museums in the UK had been identified as suitable repositories for objects from the Wellcome collection. They were the Anthropological Museum, Aberdeen; the Ashmolean Museum; Birmingham City Museums & Art Gallery; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; the Manchester City Art Gallery; the Manchester Museum; Merseyside County Museums, Liverpool; the Royal Museum of Scotland; and the Science Museum. The latter was given first refusal over the material, then a curator from each of the other museums requested individual pieces. The distribution seems to have aimed at putting material where it would go to best use rather than making an even allocation. The donation to Bristol was intended to 'fill the gaps', since we didn't have much classical pottery at that time. It was during this process that the aryballos found a home in Bristol. It's now used for teaching school groups about Greek ceramics.