Saving Wedgwood 4: the enlightened Scotsman

"We walked hence to see the Palazzo Barberini, design'd by the now Pop<e>s Architect Cavaliere Bernini, & which I take to be as superb, and princely an object, as any modern building in Europ for the quantity:
…to this is annexed a Gallery completely furnish'd <with> whatsoever Art can call rare and singular, & a Library full of worthy Collections, Medails, Marbles, and Manuscripts;"

Diary entry, Rome,  November 1644, John Evelyn, (ed. E.S. de Beer)

Among the Collections, was a Roman blue glass cameo vase,  decorated with scenes in white relief,  dating from the reign of Augustus, which (already famous for its beauty and mystery) was acquired by the Barberini family in 1627.  Over a century and a half  later in 1780 it was sold to meet gambling debts and in turn was sold on by James Byres to Sir William Hamilton in 1783.

James Byres, the dealer and intermediary, was an architect, antiquarian and scholar from Aberdeen, whose family fled to France after the Jacobite rising, then living in Rome and leading English visitors around the sights.
 "My guide was Mr. Byres, a Scottish antiquary of experience and taste.  But in the
daily labour of 18 weeks the powers of attention were sometimes fatigued."   Memoirs  Edward Gibbon

     

Temple of the Sybil in Tivoli,  etching, G.& F. Piranesi, c. 1756

Byres made a serious study of Etruscan painted tombs, on which the Adam brothers drew for their fashionable neoclassical interiors. His scholarly and philosophical interests also stretched to fossils and volcanoes, interests he shared with Sir William Hamilton, and it was the influence of Byres's pioneering work that led Wedgwood to name his new factory "Etruria".

see:  The Portland Vase  Susan Walker © Trustees of the British Museum
and www.savewedgwood.org

Sydney -- Queen Lucinda

"He tracked her back down Sussex Street. They passed the alleyway above which the majority of his colleagues still worked over their ledgers.  Only six buildings down, but on the other side of the street, she went into a tall brick building with bright yellow sandstone ledges to its windows.  Prince Rupert's Glassworks (Office) 5th Floor.

Printing presses occupied the first three floors and the building thumped with their rhythms.  The staircase was filled with the harsh and volatile odours of inks.  Through an open door he saw men in aprons filling their formes from fonts of type. He was sweating as heavily as if he had sat in his normal place in Mr d'Abbs's establishment.

The firms on the fourth floor were, either through lack of custom or because of progressive management, closed for the Saturday afternoon.  The landing was quite deserted, apart from a charlady on her knees, clicking her tongue about this second vandal come marching across her work.  She was not mollified by tiptoeing.

Three firms had their names displayed on dark wooden doors on the fifth floor, all done in different scripts in careful gold leaf with jet-black gold shadows.  The first one he looked at was Prince Rupert's Glassworks.

He knocked, but only lightly, and entered after the very briefest pause.  It was no more than a single room, a desk, three chairs, all crushed beneath a sloping ceiling.  There was no rug on the floor, but the wall behind the desk held a framed etching of the Crystal Palace, and on the wall opposite the windows ( at which Lucinda now stood, her graceless hat held in her hand) there was a great bank of glass shelves displaying a dustless collection of bottles, (green, bright yellow, poison blue) and square book-sized sheets of glass in various finishes and colours. As the sun now played upon these shelves they glowed and bled and washed across each other like the contents of a casket in a children's story."

Oscar and Lucinda  Peter Carey