Background
He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1733.
He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1733.
His house was in Via Paolina. By 1764 he was so well acquainted with the ancient sites and the cabinets of collectors that he took about a party of colonial Americans, including Samuel Powel of Philadelphia, who unlike his British peers, took assiduous notes. Byres, as well as some others British residents in Rome such as Thomas Jenkins and Colin Morison, worked as an art dealer, working with important European collectors.
Among the antiquities that passed through his hands, the most famous may be the Portland Vase, which he sold to Sir William Hamilton in 1770.
Among the commissions for which he acted as agent was the Noli me Tangere of Raphael Mengs, 1771, for an altarpiece for All Souls College, 1771. A clear idea of his own collection can be gleaned from a 1790 inventory made upon his return to Tonley.
Concerning the Etruscans Byres formulated the hypothesis that Etruscan literature has not come down to us because it was purposely destroyed by the Romans. Before he left Rome in 1790 he made a payment to the maître d"hôtel of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal York in favour of the Duchess of Albany, illegitimate daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, so it may be inferred that his Jacobite sensibility ran deep.
He died at Tonley in Aberdeenshire on 3 September 1817.
Byres was a member of a family of Scottish Jacobite sympathisers who settled in Rome in 1758, where he became a cicerone and an art dealer, mainly to Scottish and English gentlemen on the Grand Tour until his return to Scotland in 1790. In Rome members of his circle were drawn by Angelica Kauffman in a sketchbook she used from 1762 to 1764: the portraits include the English painter Nathaniel Dance, Gavin Hamilton, and the abbé Peter Grant.
