A DERBY PAINTER AND A DERBY MAKER

Friend Maxwell Craven shares a fascinating insight into the lesser known history of Derby painter and maker, Francis Bassano

Francis Bassano was a rather superior Derby painter and a member of an old and fascinating family. In Stephen Glover’s account of the family, he is referred to as a ‘herald painter’ and indeed, thanks to the survival of one of his account books in Local Studies, we can say with confidence that he painted the funeral hatchment to Thomas Chambers and also that of his wife Margaret, painted in 1726 and 1735 respectively. They are well executed and clearly by a more competent hand than that painted for the arriviste Alderman Henry Franceys who died in 1747.

Indeed, it is through Mr. Franceys that we know of a much weightier work by Bassano: the painting of the frescoed ceiling of the saloon on the first floor of Mr. Franceys’s very grand house in Market Head, executed for the good alderman’s father William in about 1710. This showed the Gods on Parnassus and included a cheeky vignette of Mr and Mrs Franceys in one corner. It is said that the work only really came into its own when there was snow freshly fallen on the Market Place after the removal of the buildings opposite in 1877. The reflected light apparently really did the work justice! Unfortunately, the ceiling was destroyed when the room of the 1694 town house was divided in 1936, although the portrait of Mr and Mrs Franceys was rescued for the collections at Derby Museums.

Francis was born at Lichfield on 17th October 1675, the elder brother of Christopher Bassano (16791745), a teacher of music and instrumentalist who, in 1709, had married the daughter and heiress of Derby attorney James Motteram, thereby enabling his son Richard to succeed him in his legal practice.

The family were originally from Bassano de Grappa in the Trentino foothills of northern Italy - an ancestor, Jeronimo, being a Venetian sackbut virtuoso. Two of his equally talented sons were recruited by Henry VIII to join the King’s Band, and a grandson, Arturo, was added to the family in England by Queen Elizabeth I, and it was from him that Francis descended.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the King’s Musick went into limbo, its members dispersed.

The then head of the family, Richard (they had long since anglicised their names), fled to Stone (Staffordshire), becoming a music teacher. Happier times returned with the Restoration, enabling his son, also Richard, to became a Vicar Choral at Lichfield Cathedral. The younger Richard (16541729) was the father of Christopher and Francis.

Francis was in demand right across the Midlands for the painting of funeral hatchments, carriage door panels and similar, which clearly constituted his bread-and-butter. He is known to have painted portraits and landscapes too (although identifying them today is a challenge), and was also a careful and well-informed antiquary, recording the interiors of Derbyshire churches, especially the arms, monuments and stained glass. Bassano never married and died at his house in Derby in 1746. Nevertheless, the creative talent of his family survived him. His great-nephew’s wife, known to be a great beauty, modelled for Joseph Wright’s Maria and Her Dog Silvio (from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey) in 1777, and a 19th century descendant, Louisa, became an internationally famous diva who also performed in Derby in the 1840s.

Yet the neglected Derby ‘maker’ was George Henry Bassano (1840-1913), a Derby manufacturing electrician who designed and perfected the Rolls-Royce of early gramophones, the astonishingly ahead-of-its-time Bassanophone of 1908 (date of patent).

At the time, taste was moving away from the rather crude Edison Phonograph to the more sophisticated and versatile gramophone, and George Henry believed he could improve considerably on the basic format through better engineering and higher quality. He began manufacturing his machines in modest numbers at his works in Bridge Street until the First World War, despite George Henry having died in 1913. There was an agreement to market them in Canada in 1912, but the war killed that too.

George Henry was truly a Derby maker, but his machines are rare, simply because he charged rather more for them than for an ordinary HMV job, nor did he have the capacity to make them in particularly large numbers, for they were entirely hand-built.

The main difference is that he did away with the cumbersome horn, so familiar to old gramophones today, creating a built-in metal soundbox, which also eliminated surface hiss. He also patented an automatic stopping device, so that as soon as the needle reached the end of the record, the motor stopped, so there was no need for someone to stand over the machine all of the time. The motor also ran long enough even to play the then rare 12-inch records, another refinement! Furthermore, the spring was guaranteed not to break.

One of the aims I set myself when I was Keeper of Antiquities, was to seek one out and acquire one, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that one of my spies located an example in private hands in Lancashire. It was a delightful ‘miniature’ machine, set in a mahogany and box-inlaid case of the highest quality. Better still, it was in excellent condition and in full working order. In consequence, I obtained an independent valuation from a friend, James Lewis, then of Neale’s in Becket Street, and managed to complete the acquisition, putting it on display in the gallery which connects the Soldier’s Story Gallery to the Joseph Wrights.

The example we bought (with a V&A grant-in-aid plus match funding from the Friends) was what was advertised as a ‘Miniature Bassanophone No. 1’ (intended for table-top as well as floor use) and originally cost £16 in an inlaid case. The threefoot (91.5cm) tall, free-standing machines cost 50 guineas (£52.50).

After the war killed off the market for high-end domestic equipment, the firm went on to make coils and automatic signalling equipment for the Royal Navy – examples of which the Museum has yet to acquire. George Henry was also a naturalist and a keen cycling pioneer.

There was a Bassano educational connection, too. A great niece of Wright’s sitter, married the pioneer schoolmaster Thomas Swanwick (1754-1814), an educational pioneer and friend of Erasmus Darwin, whose enjoyable memorial stands near the organ console in the Cathedral’s north aisle. She also taught and carried on the St. Mary’s Gate school after his death.