A NOBLE ETRUSCAN TROPHY
From 1738, large numbers of antique painted pottery vases, initially identified as Etruscan, were excavated at Herculaneum and, from 1748, at Pompeii. By 1772, British scholars accepted that they were in fact imports from Greece, made for elite Etruscans and placed in their tombs for use in the afterlife. They were acquired as curiosities by Grand Tourists, attracted by their pictorial repertoire of religious rituals, theatrical scenes and athletic competitions.
This bell krater is a 5th- century BC Athenian red-figure pottery vessel at
Petworth, West Sussex. Bell- shaped kraters were used for mixing wine and water at symposia (drinking parties). With red-figure painting, the decorative motifs remained the colour of the orange clay and the background was filled in with slip, which turned a glossy black in the three- stage firing process.
The principal side of this krater depicts a procession. Led by a pipe-playing satyr Dionysos, the god of wine, with his sta and two-handled cup (kantharos), is followed by a torch-bearing maenad (follower) with a wine jug. The reverse depicts three draped youths in discourse, a motif used repeatedly by this unidentified workshop. At least four other vessels have been identified as being decorated by the same artist, recently named ‘the Petworth Painter’. They may have been acquired by either Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont (1710– 63), an important early collector of antique marble sculpture, or his son George O’Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont (1751–1837). Both were members of the Society of Dilettanti, a scholarly dining club that supports the study of antiquity. The 3rd Earl visited Italy on his Grand Tour in 1770–72, when he presumably met the renowned antiquities collector Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies, who sold his first collection to the British Museum in 1772 for £8,400. Hamilton’s collection was published in 1766–7 by P H d’Hancarville, which fuelled an ‘Etruscomania’.
In 1769, Wedgwood capitalised on the fashion for red-figure ‘Etruscan’ vases with his ‘encaustic’ black basalt (stoneware) body. Designed to be displayed on chimneypieces as garnitures, their shapes and decoration were based on engravings in d’Hancarville’s book. Customers of the imitations, which were often referred to as ‘Hamilton vases’, included John Parker, later Baron Boringdon of Saltram, Devon; the banker Henry Hoare II of Stourhead, Wiltshire, who in 1770 purchased not only ‘Hamilton vases’ but also early volumes of d’Hancarville; and Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, who in 1813 ordered 16 ‘Hamilton vases’ for the library at Bowood House, Wiltshire.