Lyde Browne FSA (died 10 September 1787, Foster Lane, Cheapside, London) was an 18th-century English antiquary and banker, who owned one of the largest antiquities collections of the time. This now forms the nucleus of the classical sculpture collections of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Pavlovsk Palace in the city's suburbs. The Hermitage Museum website calls him John Lyde-Brown, [1] as does The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. [2]
Browne was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1752 (though he resigned in 1772). He travelled to Florence and Rome between 1753 and 1754. In Rome in 1758, he met the sculptor Simon Vierpyl, the archaeologist William Wilkins, and the buyer and collector Thomas Jenkins. Jenkins became his buying agent, sending him drawings of the statues he had purchased. These drawings were often given by Browne to the Society of Antiquaries in London.
By 1762, Browne moved the museum he had established in Rome back to his country house, Warren House in Wimbledon. In 1768, he published Catalogus veteris aevi varii generis monumentorum quae cimeliarchio Lyde Browne … asservantur (Catalogue of the various ancient monuments in the museum of Lyde Browne), a Latin catalogue of 130 of its objects with 80 detailed entries. That year,[ citation needed ] he also became a director of the Bank of England, [3] a post he held until his death.
He then took a second journey to Italy between 1776 and 1778, during which Pompeo Batoni painted his eldest daughter Frances's portrait. In 1779, he published Catologo [sic] dei piu scelti e preziosi marmi, che si conservano nella galleria del Sigr Lyde Browne (Catalogue of the choicest and most precious marbles in the gallery of Mr Lyde Browne), another (Italian) catalogue of 260 objects. Both this and the earlier catalogue provided provenance for marbles and other objects from well known Italian collections and excavations near Rome; a third seems to have been planned, judging by the survival of drawings of more objects from the collection by Giovanni Battista Cipriani prepared for engraving.
His collection was in constant flux, with the buying and selling of many objects. He sold most of it to Catherine the Great for £22,000 in 1784,[ citation needed ] though his agent in St Petersburg went bankrupt and Browne only got £10,000 of this sum. Browne died soon afterwards, in 1787.
He married Margaret Barwell after 15 November 1751. [4] He and his wife Margaret had a son also named Lyde Browne and five other children.
Browne died of a stroke on 10 September 1787 at Foster Lane, Cheapside, London. [5] On 30 May the following year, Christie's auctioned what remained of the collection (including paintings, terracotta models, prints, and drawings). Browne's estate at his death was still worth over £12,000 (divided equally into three bequests to his sons), along with many small gifts.
Charles Townley FRS was a wealthy English country gentleman, antiquary and collector, a member of the Towneley family. He travelled on three Grand Tours to Italy, buying antique sculpture, vases, coins, manuscripts and Old Master drawings and paintings. Many of the most important pieces from his collection, especially the Townley Marbles are now in the British Museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The marbles were overshadowed at the time, and still today, by the Elgin Marbles.
The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 10th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022.
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni was an Italian painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures. The high number of foreign visitors travelling throughout Italy and reaching Rome during their "Grand Tour" led the artist to specialize in portraits.
Hubert Robert was a French painter in the school of Romanticism, noted especially for his landscape paintings and capricci, or semi-fictitious picturesque depictions of ruins in Italy and of France.
The National Archaeological Museum of Naples is an important Italian archaeological museum, particularly for ancient Roman remains. Its collection includes works from Greek, Roman and Renaissance times, and especially Roman artifacts from the nearby Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum sites. From 1816 to 1861, it was known as Real Museo Borbonico.
The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Ares, a fine 2nd-century copy of a late 4th-century BCE Greek original, associated with Scopas or Lysippus: thus the Roman god of war receives his Greek name, Ares.
Charles-Louis Clérisseau was a French architect, draughtsman, antiquary, and artist who became a leading authority on ancient Roman architecture and Roman ruins in Italy and France. With his influence extending to Russia, England, and the United States, and clients including Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson, Clérisseau played a key role in the genesis of neoclassical architecture during the second half of the 18th century.
Antonio Cavallucci was an eighteenth-century Italian painter of religious scenes and portraits.
The Athena Giustiniani or Minerva Giustiniani is a Roman marble statue of Pallas Athena, based on a Greek bronze sculpture of the late 5th–early 4th century BCE. Formerly in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, it is now in the Vatican Museums.
Thomas Jenkins was a British artist who went to Rome accompanying the British landscape-painter Richard Wilson about 1750 and remained behind, establishing himself in the city by serving as cicerone and sometimes banker to the visiting British, becoming a dealer in Roman sculpture and antiquities to a largely British clientele and an agent for gentlemen who wished a portrait or portrait-bust as a memento of the Grand Tour.
Bernardino Ludovisi, also called Bernardo, was an Italian sculptor.
The Westmorland or Westmoreland was a 26-gun British privateer frigate, operating in the Mediterranean Sea against French shipping in retaliation for France's opposition to Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War.
The Resting Satyr or Leaning Satyr, also known as the Satyr anapauomenos is a statue type generally attributed to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Some 115 examples of the type are known, of which the best known is in the Capitoline Museums.
Henry Blundell was an English art collector, who amassed a large collection of art and antiquities at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire.
Carlo Albacini was an Italian sculptor and restorer of Ancient Roman sculpture.
The marble Cupid and Psyche conserved in the Capitoline Museums, Rome, is a 1st or 2nd century Roman copy of a late Hellenistic period original. It was given to the nascent Capitoline Museums by Pope Benedict XIV in 1749, shortly after its discovery. Its graceful balance and sentimental appearance made it a favourite among the neoclassical generations of artists and visitors, and it was copied in many materials from bronze to biscuit porcelain. Antonio Canova consciously set out to outdo the Antique original with his own Cupid and Psyche of 1808
The classical sculptures in the Farnese Collection, one aspect of this large art collection, are one of the first collections of artistic items from Greco-Roman antiquity. It includes some of the most influential classical works, including the sculptures that were part of the Farnese Marbles, their collection of statuary, which includes world-famous works like the Farnese Hercules, Farnese Cup, Farnese Bull and the Farnese Atlas. These statues are now displayed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum in Italy with some in the British Museum in London.
John Brown was a Scottish artist.
Christopher M. S. Johns was an American art historian, and the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, who specialized in eighteenth-century Italian art, decorative art, material culture, and architecture. He was a leading scholar of early modern Italian art and culture, especially the relationship between art, politics, and religion in eighteenth-century Rome.
A bust of Hadrian, the second-century Roman emperor who rebuilt the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma, was formerly displayed in Pope Sixtus V's Villa Montalto and is now displayed at the British Museum in London. The bust is one of the Townley Marbles collected by Charles Townley (1737–1805) and sold by his heir Peregrine Edward Towneley at a reduced price to the British Museum in 1805. Unlike most busts of Hadrian and other emperors, it shows him in heroic nudity. The bust was found in Rome and is carved from Greek marble.
