James Byres

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James Byres of Tonley

Old Master paintings and antiquities
.

Biography

Portrait of James Byres by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, ca.1782-1791
Portrait of James Byres painted in 1810.

He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1733.[1]

Byres was a member of a family of Scottish Jacobite sympathisers.[2] As a young man he joined Ogilvie's Regiment in the French service, but did not pursue a military career for long.[3] In 1758 he settled in Rome, where he studied painting and architecture and became a cicerone and an art dealer, mainly to Scottish and English gentlemen on the Grand Tour until his return to Scotland in 1790.[4] His house was in Via Paolina.

Byres was a painter and an adept designer, whose

Lord Clive.[3] Byres, as well as some others British residents in Rome such as Thomas Jenkins
and Colin Morison, worked as an art dealer, working with important European collectors.

William Constable purchased from Byres many of the Italian paintings and marble copies after Roman sculptures at

In 1783 he was one of the founder members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[1]

A clear idea of his own collection can be gleaned from a 1790 inventory made upon his return to Tonley. Though he sent many of his clients to Pompeo Batoni, the only Batoni portrait hanging in his house was of his sister Isabella, Mrs Robert Sandilands.[10]

As an archaeologist, Byres' main interest was in the

Etruscans. He prepared a volume of text and plates of which only the plates were posthumously published under the title Hypogaei or Sepulchral Caverns of Tarquinia.[3]
He formulated the hypothesis that Etruscan literature has not come down to us because it was purposely destroyed by the Romans.

After the French occupation of Rome in 1788 many of the artworks and antiquities Byres owned were sent to the Magazin National de la Republique Francaise in Paris.[3] Before he left the city in 1790 he made a payment to the maître d'hôtel of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal York in favour of the Duchess of Albany, illegitimate daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, so it may be inferred that his Jacobite sensibility ran deep.

He died at Tonley in Aberdeenshire on 3 September 1817.[1]

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 090219884X. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 18 September 2015. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help
    )
  2. ^ His father Patrick Byres went abroad after Battle of Culloden; "The Byres Family: An Eighteenth Century Portrait Group", The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 82 No. 479 (February 1943, pp. 46-47, 49, p 48.
  3. ^
    National Galleries of Scotland
    , pp. 14 - 23
  4. ISBN 978-0-902198-84-5. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 4 October 2006. Retrieved 19 November 2011.
  5. ^ John Fleming, in Connoisseur Year Book 1959 pp 24-27 and Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle (Harvard University Press) 1962, pp 306, 378.
  6. ^ Peter Grant of Blairfindry, head of the Scottish Mission. Arthur S. Marks, "Angelica Kauffman and Some Americans on the Grand Tour" American Art Journal 12.2 (Spring 1980, pp. 4-24) p. 5.
  7. ^ Samuel Powel's "Short Notes on a Course of Antiquities at Rome in Company with Messers Apthorp Morgan & Palmer begun May 21, 1764 under Mr Byers Antiquarian" is conserved at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; (Marks 1980:11 note 31).
  8. ^ Christopher Gilbert, "William Constable as Patron (1721-1791) at Hull" The Burlington Magazine 112 No. 804 (March 1970), pp. 178, 183-184).
  9. ^ John Sparrow, "An Oxford altar-piece" The Burlington Magazine 102 No. 682 (January 1960), pp 2, 4-9.
  10. ^ Francis Russell, "Batoni's Mrs Sandilands and Other Portraits from the Collection of James Byres" The Burlington Magazine 120 No. 899 (February 1978), pp. 114, 116-117.

Further reading

  • P. Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel XVIII secolo: , Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2010, pp. 70–77
  • I. Bignamini, C. Hornsby, Digging And Dealing In Eighteenth-Century Rome (2010), p. 246-248
  • P. Coen, La carriera di mercante d'arte e il profilo culturale di James Byres of Tonley (1737-1824), in La città degli artisti nell’età di Pio VI, a cura di L. Barroero, S. Susinno, «Roma moderna e contemporanea», X, 2002, pp. 153–178
  • Brinsley Ford, 'James Byres, principal antiquarian to the English visitors to Rome', in Apollo; 99 (June 1974), pp 446–61.
  • Skinner, Basil C. (1966), Scots in Italy in the 18th Century, National Galleries of Scotland
  • W.T. Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England 1700-1790 (1928) ii, pp247–48.