Tags
Charles Francis Greville, Grevillea, John Boydell, Jonathan Spilsbury, Lady Emma Hamilton, Old books, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir William Hamilton
Ancient Gems contains 36 engravings of classical subjects and all originally appeared in A Collection of Fifty Prints from Antique Gems: In the Collections of the Right Honourable Earl Percy, the Honourable C.F. Greville & T.M. Slade, Esq. published by John Boydell in 1784/85. The plates have come away from the boards and there is no title-page or text except on the plates themselves.
Mentioned above is Charles Francis Greville (1749 – 1809) who was a great collector of antiquities, politician, Fellow of the Royal Society, member of the Society of Dilettanti and close friend of Sir Joseph Banks. Greville’s involvement with horticulture resulted in a genus of Australasian flowering plant being named after him – Grevillea of which there are about 360 species.
Greville’s mistress in the early 1780s was Emma Hart who later became the famous Lady Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815). Greville introduced Emma to his uncle Sir William Hamilton the British Ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples and they married in 1791.
It was in Naples Emma first met Lord Nelson in 1793 when he arrived to negotiate with the King of Naples for reinforcements during the French Revolutionary Wars. Nelson returned to Naples in 1798 and their famous love affair lasted until Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The engraver of the plates is noted as J. Spilsbury believed to be Jonathan Spilsbury (1737 -1812) and not his brother John Spilsbury who was also an engraver and credited with the invention of the jigsaw puzzle.
To the far left of Spilsbury’s name on some of the plates and almost illegible are London, Pub. J. Boydell and dates in the early 1780s.