Summary

Sculpture, bronze; colza-oil lamp; Thomas Messenger and Sons Ltd., Birmingham; c. 1835-40. A pair of bronze lamps that use the technology invented by the Swiss physicist Ami Argand (1750-1803) to create lighting that was many times brighter than candles. Argand’s invention brought a revolutionary improvement to domestic lighting in the early 1800s. The neo-classical design of this lamp is in the form of an ancient drinking vessel known as a rhyton, based on an element of a Roman tomb on the Appian way in Rome, that would have been known in the nineteenth century through an engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). The lamps were produced in Birmingham by Thomas Messenger and Sons Ltd, the best-known manufacturer of lighting products in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Full description

A pair of bronze colza-oil lamps, in rhyton form, the snout in the form of a boar’s head, out of the back of which emerges acanthus leaf ornament, rising to a gadrooned body that opens into a flared cover, with gadrooned decoration round the edges and in the centre a stylised lotus flower. In the central ovary is a small hole, out of which projects a separately-made small handle. The main lamp handle is curved and with acanthus leaf decoration. A large acanthus leaf also emerges from the boar’s mouth and holds the vertical chamber for the lamp, with an inner sleeve. On a rectangular base with gadrooning along the sides and at the corners stylised acanthus leaf, resting on four button feet in the form of stylised buds. On underside of base, stamped ‘MESSENGER’.The lamps are made from several separately cast pieces bolted together, the main fixing being a bolt into the base, fastened underneath with a nut; two more screws in underside of base hold the underside of head of the boar. The separately made sections are: the top, including the gadrooned stem; the moveable handle in the top of lamp; main body of the lamp, including handle; boar’s head and lower sprig of acanthus; lamp holder; convex base of lampholder; rectangular base; four bun feet.These are a pair of identical colza-oil or Argand lamps. Argand lamps, which were invented in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, became popular throughout Europe and in America in the early nineteenth century, especially valued for the brilliance of the light that they delivered. Before the arrival of Argand lamps most households, even those of better-off families, had relied for their lighting very largely on candles, which were expensive. It was not unusual for an entire family to sit in the evening around a table lit by a single candle, perhaps supplemented by light from the fire. As their name suggests, Argand lamps used technology first developed by the Swiss physicist Ami Argand (1750-1803) between 1780 and 1784, and subsequently developed in collaboration with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham. In 1784, Argand took out a British patent that claimed the invention to be ‘a lamp that is so constructed to produce neither smoke nor smell, and to give considerably more light than any lamp hitherto known.’ (Rutherford 1992, pp. 79-80). However, the patent expired just two years later, leaving the field open for manufacturers in Britain and elsewhere to pirate the technology. The success of Argand’s lamp was noted in Abraham Rees’s 1819 Cyclopaedia,: ‘This invention embraces so many improvements upon the common lamp, and has become so general throughout Europe, that it may be justly ranked among the greatest discoveries of the age.’ (Rees, Vol. 20, ‘Lamp’).The Cyclopaedia also provided a detailed explanation of the functioning of the lamp with illustrative diagrams. The revolutionary increase in the strength of the light-source was due to two key innovations. The first was the placing of the wick, a flat rolled-up band, within two concentric tubes, which provided the flame with a double current of air, from both within and from without. The second was the placing of a glass chimney over the concentric tubes, the effect being not only to increase the draught of air, but also to intensify the brightness of the light – to as much as twenty times the light of a candle. These lamps used colza (or cole-seed) oil, made from rapeseed or sea-kale oil (and later whale oil), so became commonly known as colza lamps. Because colza oil – like today’s cooking oils - is too thick and viscous to be drawn up into the wick by capillary action, the reservoir had to be placed higher than the wick, allowing the oil to run down to the wick by force of gravity.In the case of the boar’s head lamp, the acanthus leaf issuing from the boar’s mouth contains the conduit to the vertical section with the double burner tube that would have held the wick; the convex section at the bottom of this tube served both to capture any spilt oil and to provide an extra ingress point for air. The original glass shade that would have fitted onto the burner tube is now missing. The oil reservoir was in the upper section of the lamp, which could be opened to facilitate refilling. The little handle in the top of the lotus flower was used to open the reservoir to allow oil to flow to the wick.The lamp is distinctively shaped, in the form of a rhyton, a type of drinking cup used across the ancient world for drinking ceremonies or libations. Conical in form, rhytons were often made in the shape of an animal’s body or head, here a wild boar. The source for the design was clearly an engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) who, in his compilation 'Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi, Tripodi, Lucerne, ed Ornamenti Antichi', published in two volumes in 1778, included two engravings of a tomb monument to Augustus Urbanus on the Appian Way in Rome, surmounted by a very similar boars-head rhyton with extensive acanthus ornament. One of the two engravings was dedicated to the Earl of Lincoln, presumably Henry Pelham-Clinton, 2nd Duke of Newcastle under Lyne (1720-1794).Both lamps are stamped ‘Messenger’ on the underside of the bases, identifying them as products of Thomas Messenger and Sons Ltd., the most important manufacturer of oil and gas lighting during much of the nineteenth century. Begun in 1797 in partnership with Thomas Phipson, the firm advertised itself initially as ‘Brass Founders, Manufacturers of Church Candlesticks, Patent Lamps, Etc.’. In 1822 an office was opened in London, at 21 Grenville Street, Hatton Garden, but just a year later, in 1823, the partnership with Phipson was dissolved, leaving Messenger as a sole trader until 1828, when his son Samuel joined the business, renamed as ‘Thomas Messenger and Son.’ After the death of Thomas Messenger in 1832, the firm became known as ‘Thomas Messenger and Sons’, continuing to operate from Hatton Garden and Broad Street, Birmingham until the 1860s. The business survived into the 1920s.A pair of lamps of the same model, at Temple Newsam House (Leeds City Art Galleries), was one of three pairs of lamps bought from Messenger in 1838 by the 4th Duke of Newcastle for his house, Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire (Rutherford 1992, pp. 145-46, no. 121). This allows the Kingston Lacy lamps to be dated to the later 1830s, meaning that they were probably bought by William John Bankes, although no bill for them has been identified. It was clearly a successful model; a rhyton features on the trade-card for Messenger and Sons, published in 1836, in which the firm described its business as ‘Manufacturers of Chandeliers, Tripods and Lamps of every description in bronze, and or-molu’ (British Museum, Inv. Heal,66.45). Other examples of the same model in National Trust collections are a pair at Uppark, which are partly gilded and,laike so many of these lamps, have now been converted to electricity (NT 137997.1 & 2). Another pair at Springhill (NT 216285.1 & 2) have lost their top section with the oil reservoir and the handle. There is another pair of the lamps, also stamped by Messenger, in the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, whilst another pair is in the collections of the Adams National Historical Park, Quincy, Massachusetts.There are further colza lamps at Kingston Lacy, firstly a single lamp (NT 1255226) in which the horn shape is in the shape of a lotus bud. Another pair of lamps (NT 1255225) is much closer to the boar’s head lamps and is also in rhyton form. They may too have been made by Messenger, although they are not quite so sophisticated as the boar’s head lamps. Their principal difference lies in the replacement of the boars’ heads with dolphin heads, whilst the decorative elements are less rigidly neo-classical and somewhat fussier. A full-size drawing of one of these dolphin lamps in the Bankes Archive was made by Seymour, the steward at Kingston Lacy, in response to a request from William Bankes in Venice (Dorset History Centre, Bankes Archive, D/BKL/F/A/11/7/95). Seymour inscribed the drawing, on a sheet with many other notes and sketches responding to William Bankes’s incessant demands for information, ‘Sketch of lamps full size standing in Saloon.’ The drawing is valuable in showing the lamp with its glass chimney, now lost, especailly since both these lamps were subsequently converted to electricity.Seymour's note also tells us that the lamps were in use at Kingston Lacy in the saloon, the main representative space in the house. Although Argand or colza lamps were hugely popular and successful, they by no means entirely supplanted candle lighting in domestic interiors in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Evidence suggests a range of approaches that often depended on personal taste. Drawing rooms and parlours often continued to use candles along with chandeliers, whilst chandeliers and wall sconces remained popular in dining rooms. It can well be imagined that William Bankes might have favoured the bright light given off by the colza lamps, for the comfort of his sister Anne and others living at Kingston Lacy, but also to show off to better effect the interiors he had created and the works of art with which he was furnishing them.Jeremy WarrenFebruary 2024