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James Byres of Tonley: Jacobites and Etruscans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2015
Abstract
James Byres of Tonley (1734–1817) is a pivotal figure in many respects, whose life as a virtuoso has been the subject of exemplary scholarship in the fields of art history and the history of archaeology. For three decades, he was close to the centre of the circle of artists, antiquarians and art-dealers who guided and advised the grand tourists and student artists visiting Rome, then the unchallenged capital of the visual arts worldwide. His fortunes, and those of his family, are typical of those of the last generation of Aberdeenshire Catholics before the Relief Acts of the late eighteenth century and the death of Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, in 1807. Like many Scots, whose cultural or military achievements were enacted in continental exile, he is not particularly remembered nor celebrated in Scotland itself.
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References
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1 Timothy, Mowl, ‘A Roman Palace for a Welsh Prince, Byres’ designs for Sir Watkyn Williams-Wynn’, Apollo, November, 1995 (Hereafter ‘Mowl, 1995’), p. 33.Google Scholar
2 Harry, Gordon Slade, ‘James Byres of Tonley (1734–1817): the Architecture of a Scottish Cicerone’, Architectural Heritage II (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 18–28.Google Scholar
3 Brinsley, Ford, ‘James Byres, Principal Antiquarian for the English Visitors to Rome’, Apollo, June, 1974 (hereafter, ‘Ford, 1974’), p. 450,Google Scholar ‘It can hardly be doubted that Byres made designs for many other country houses, and in the course of time it may well be discovered that one of them was actually built’.
4 Ford, 1974, p. 449, reproduced a Byres design for a marble candelabrum dated 1765, which drawing is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Piranesi dedicated two plates of (heavily restored) antique marbles to Byres in his last publication, the Vase of 1778, including a representation of a candelabrum, one of a pair now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The other plate dedicated to Byres represents the piece known as the Piranesi Vase, now in the British Museum.
5 John, Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (London: John Murray, 1962), p. 378.Google Scholar
6 Mowl, 1995, p. 39.
7 National Library of Scotland, MS 10339, f. 54r.
8 John, Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).Google Scholar The biography of Byres is on pp. 169–72. There are also biographies of his friends and associates: Andrew Lumisden, pp. 616–17; Colin Morison, pp. 679–82; Christopher Norton, pp. 715–16.
9 This has been done already by Ridgway, D., ‘James Byres and the ancient state of Italy: unpublished documents in Edinburgh’, Istituto di studi Etruschi e Italici, secondo congresso internazionale Etrusco, Atti, I (Florence, 1985), pp. 213–29.Google Scholar
10 Although many Aberdeenshire Catholics were Jacobites, it should be remembered that the (generally high-church) northern Episcopalians constituted the bulk of Jacobite supporters.
11 Personal communication from Mr. Kieran German, University of Aberdeen, May 2010, drawing on research for his forthcoming doctoral dissertation on the Jacobite community in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
12 Ford, 1974, p. 447.
13 It is notable that the great volumes of Piranesi's engravings are represented with legible titles in Byres's drawings for the library in the unrealised Wynnstay plans, cf. Mowl, 1995, p. 35.
14 Brinsley Ford’, Thomas Jenkins, Banker, Dealer and Unofficial English agent’, Apollo, June, 1974, pp. 416–25.
15 Ford, 1974, p. 460. Ford also reproduces a now-lost late portrait of Byres by Sir Henry Raeburn, the last fruit of an association which had begun with Raeburn's visit to Rome in 1784–86, at which time Byres gave him an early commission to paint his nephew (and, ultimately, successor in his antiquarian enterprises) Patrick, Moir. Duncan Thomson, Raeburn: the Art of Sir Henry Raeburn, 1756–1823 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1997) p. 52.Google Scholar
16 National Library of Scotland, Moir/Byres papers, deposit 184B.
17 A full academic discussion of this important subject will be found in D. Ridgway, op. cit.
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22 Fleming, 1962, p. 349.
23 Fleming, 1962, p. 146.
24 Ingamells, p. 681.
25 These five drawings form part of AUL MS K 252, which also includes a drawing, probably dating from 1773 and most probably by John Adam, for re-casting the college in a revivalist style taking its cue from the idiosyncratic early sixteenth century gothic of the College Chapel.
26 AUL MS K 272.
27 Harry Gordon Slade (1991), p. 26. The position of the chimney-stacks and the rhythm of the fenestration would certainly indicate an extension at either end of a classic Laird's house of the eighteenth century.
28 Personal communication from Normile Baxter Esq. of Aquahorthies, May 2008.
29 NLS MS 184B.
30 See especially, Anne, Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 333–34;Google Scholar Alison, Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),Google Scholar Chapter 6 passim.
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32 Ed. Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh:Scottish History Society, 1888).
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