In 1778 Horace Walpole wrote to the antiquary William Cole, lamenting that though ‘one may revive what is perished … it will perish again, if more life is not breathed into it than it enjoyed originally’. The way to do this, Walpole believed, was through illustration, and he concluded that ‘the best merits of the Society [of Antiquaries] lies in their prints’. For over a century after the Society’s foundation, the art of engraving was the primary medium through which the remains of the past were brought to public knowledge, through the antiquarian publications of members, through Archaeologia and increasingly through the individual prints that catered to the growing middle classes eager to decorate their homes. In each of these fields, the Basire family played a key role, improving the Society’s reputation, and this tale is told thoroughly and engagingly in Goddard’s book.

Goddard (a descendant of the Basires) begins with the arrival in London of the Huguenot exile Jacques Bazire in the late seventeenth century, whose son Isaac (b. 1704) was apprenticed in 1717 to a silversmith. After four years he transferred to the engraving trade with fellow Huguenot Samuel Jallason, inaugurating a family dynasty that would flourish well into the reign of Queen Victoria. By the late 1720s Isaac was in business in his own right, probably starting out with ephemeral work including trade cards and tickets for events. By the 1730s he benefited from the increased trend towards illustrated books, providing frontispieces for a number of dramatic works, including Cent-Livre’s The Artifice (Reference Cent-Livre1735) and Steele’s The Lying Lover (Reference Steele1736). He also engraved larger plates intended to be sold individually, and in 1745 was commissioned by John Pine (who a decade earlier had engraved bookplates for Cambridge University Library) to engrave a drawing of the trial of the Jacobite Lord Lovat (the last man to be beheaded on Tower Hill). Isaac Basire was, according to Goddard, ‘a key member of the group of native engravers who sowed the seeds for the great period of English engraving’.

It is with Isaac’s son (James Basire i) – the focus of the book – that the Society of Antiquaries comes fully into the picture; and Goddard has split his story here into two parts, enforcing a somewhat awkward division between antiquarian and artistic work. James completed his apprenticeship in the usual seven years, during which one of his two masters was the limner Richard Dalton, who from 1755 served as librarian to the Prince of Wales (later George iii) and it was he – a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries – who took James on a grand tour in the late 1740s, when Dalton acted as draughtsman for the young Viscount Charlemont. About fifty of these drawings were engraved for publication (a dozen of which were James’s work) and eventually published in book form as Antiquities and views in ancient Greece and Egypt in Reference Dalton1791. Goddard does well to bring out the details of this formative period of James’s career on the Continent, and of the years between his freedom from apprenticeship in 1752 and the beginning of his formal connection with the Society of Antiquaries. James’s appointment as engraver to the Society in 1759 came after several years of instability following the resignation of the long-serving George Vertue. Having secured this coveted position, James soon found that the Society lacked a coherent policy on publication and consequently offered him little work, leading to disputes and his eventual dismissal in 1768; and the tale woven by Goddard shows James’s fortunes to be closely linked with the Society’s own vicissitudes. Chief among these was conflict between Fellows primarily interested in engraving Classical subjects, and those who felt the focus ought to be on British antiquities. Things soon improved following the appointment of Jeremiah Milles as president and Richard Gough as director in 1769 and 1771 respectively, leading to the founding of Archaeologia and a more confident programme of engraving for Vetusta Monumenta, for which publications James enjoyed ‘a near monopoly of engraving a regular flow of plates’ (c 900 plates between the two bear his name). This increased workload was supported by a number of apprentices, chief among them William Blake (1772–9). Among James’s major historical works for the Society was an engraving of a sixteenth-century picture of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the Royal Collection. It took five years to complete and represented a vast expenditure for the Society, one of several projects intended to enhance its public prestige. The initial drawings and Basire’s engraving cost 310 guineas, requiring James Whatman to manufacture the largest paper then known, still called ‘Antiquarian’ (31 × 53 inches).

The family continued to flourish, with James’s son (James Basire ii) being appointed joint engraver to the Society in 1791, though further financial instability in the early decades of the nineteenth century caused him to rely more on external work through his connections with the Hansard and Nichols publishing families. Technological changes were already beginning to threaten the craft of engraving, with lithographic draughtsmen charging a quarter of an engraver’s fee, and in 1825 the Society agreed to employ the new method ‘occasionally’. Both the Royal and Antiquarian Societies faced further financial pressures in the 1840s, selling government stock and jettisoning unsold publications, and James Basire iii agreed to reduce his prices only if he could retain his monopoly (though, he diversified by taking on lithographic work, too).

Goddard’s book was self-published and, consequently, is lacking in some areas of production. The nearly eighty illustrations (some full page) do much to complement his text and most are in colour, but detail is lost in the lack of crispness. The index has also suffered, with some individuals missing entirely (including William Bray and Zoffany, who both appear on page 226), along with Domesday Book, which is mentioned five times in the text. Nonetheless, Drawing on Copper (which is also available as a free download in PDF format) remains a valuable contribution to the place of engraving in the antiquarian movement that flourished in Georgian Britain – a movement that was in no small part driven by this Society.