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 Vanvitellian design for a palazzofacade won a prize from the Accademia di San Luca in 1762.[5] As an architect, his clients included the Duke of Gordon, Sir Lawrence Dundas and the College of Physicians in Edinburgh.[3] In Rome members of his circle were drawn by Angelica Kauffman in a sketchbook she used from 1762 to 1764: the portraits include the English painter Nathaniel Dance, Gavin Hamilton, and the abbé Peter Grant.[6] By 1764 he was so well acquainted with the ancient sites and the cabinets of collectors that he took about a party of colonial Americans, including Samuel Powel of Philadelphia, who unlike his British peers, took assiduous notes.[7] Other clients in his role as cicerone included Edward Gibbon, Charles Townley, the Dukes of Northumberland and Grafton, the Duke of Hamilton and 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. In Rome, Byres lived with his business partner, the engraver Christopher Norton.[8]
William Constable purchased from Byres many of the Italian paintings and marble copies after Roman sculptures at Burton Constable, Yorkshire, and Byres was responsible for introducing the artist Anton Maron, who painted William Constable and his sister in the pose and dress of Cato and Marcia.[9] Among the antiquities that passed through his hands, the most famous may be the Portland Vase, which he sold to Sir William Hamilton in 1770. Among the commissions for which he acted as agent was the Noli me Tangere of Raphael Mengs, 1771, for an altarpiece for All Souls College, 1771.[10]
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.[11]
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. Byres was close friends with Elyza Fraser.
^His father Patrick Byres went abroad after Battle of Culloden; "The Byres Family: An Eighteenth Century Portrait Group", The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs82 No. 479 (February 1943, pp. 46-47, 49, p 48.
^John Fleming, in Connoisseur Year Book 1959 pp 24-27 and Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle (Harvard University Press) 1962, pp 306, 378.
^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.
^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).
^Francis Russell, "Batoni's Mrs Sandilands and Other Portraits from the Collection of James Byres" The Burlington Magazine120 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.
P. Davidson, 'James Byres: a note on Catholicism, Jacobitism, and the Etruscans'
