Drawing on Copper: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and their Works. Richard Goddard.

Abstract

The huge expansion in the demand for prints in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a new phenomenon in the history of British printmaking, the family dynasty. Familiar in Paris from the late seventeenth century onwards, they first appear in London after 1750 with the Basires and Heaths, and run on after 1800 with the Findens, Cookes, Pyes, and many more. Almost all of them remain unstudied by professional historians, and they have remained the preserve of amateur enthusiasts. The most recent is Richard Goddard who has produced an extremely well researched monograph on the four generations of the Basire family, Isaac and then three successive Jameses, who between them cover the years from the 1730s to the 1850s. The author now works in the financial world, but began as a doctoral student at Oxford, and his route to the Basire family was through inheriting a group of family papers (his full name is Richard Neil Basire Goddard). The papers in truth do not amount to much, but he has examined far more thoroughly than anyone before him the existing resources, in particular the registers of births and deaths, the wills and the papers of their clients, among whom the most important were the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society, the University of Oxford, the Nichols family, and Richard Gough whose papers are in the Bodleian, as well as the new resources opened up on the web. These have yielded a surprisingly dense volume of information, which is presented at some length in this self-published book of over 300 pages. It would have benefited from a good editor, and the index is fairly rudimentary, but this will unquestionably remain the standard work for a long time.