Nathaniel Marchant 1739-1816
Marchant was one of the most well known and talented engravers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the art form was at its peak in England and the whole of Europe. Today, when an intaglio gem aficionado collects or researches the small art pieces, they quickly discover one or more of his works. His original works were frequently copied and widely reproduced as part of the “Grand Tour” collections marketed to the tourist trade.
The following is taken from a Biography presented on the British museum website which is found at: https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=83154 :
“Gem-engraver, antiquary and dealer, working in London and Rome. A pupil of Edward Burch (qv), Marchant was the foremost prizewinner of the Society of Arts competitions in intaglio engraving, winning four years running from 1761-64. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1781 to 1811 and was made an ARA in 1791. In 1772 he left for Rome to study at first hand the famous sculptures of classical antiquity. This was to bear fruit in his ‘Catalogue of 100 Impressions from Gems’, published in 1792 and the major source for his oeuvre. The impressions were accompanied by a printed text explaining the subjects of each gems. (The catalogue can be found at https://archive.org/details/catalogueofonehu00edwa/page/n8 ) Many were taken from the antique, while others were adapted from celebrated paintings or were portraits of his contemporaries, especially his patrons.”
A full biography can be found in the publication, “’Nathaniel Marchant, Gem-engraver 1739-1816′, Walpole Society, vol. LIII, 1987, pp. 1-105. By G. Seidmann, It can be found and downloaded at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41829502.pdf
A banded agate intaglio ring by Marchant sold at Bonham auction in 2015 for $33,000
Marchant’s aforementioned Catalogue of 100 Impressions from Gems, is quite widely referred to when searching for information on Marchant. The Catalogue, however, only provides text descriptions of the impressions. One must dig a little deeper to find images of the impressions. As I struggled to find the images, I first came upon those presented on the Soane Museum Collection ” Casts Made by Nathaniel Marchant” from his subscription entitled CATALOGUE OF ONE HUNDRED IMPRESSIONS FROM GEMS, Engraved by N. MARCHANT. Found at: http://collections.soane.org/object-dr10 and http://collections.soane.org/object-dr13 These low res photos helped to identify the various Marchant impressions, however, due to the fuzzy images, more was needed.
Eventually, I came upon the publication by Gertrud Seidmann mentioned above. This is the “Rosetta Stone” key to identifying the works of Marchant. In it she not only identifies about 160 of his gems (or those attributed, but undocumented, to him), but also provides individual images of just about all of them together with an index by subject name, a listing of which items are included in his Catalogue of one hundred gems, and the corresponding numbers from the Tassie Catalogue where sixty-five were included.