Chats on Old Copper and Brass

by Fred. W. Burgess

Statues and Monuments.

Reference has already been made to the beautiful statuettes of Greece. There are others, to many grand in their conceptions, the work of Roman modellers, many representing Apollo, Hercules, Mars, and Mercury having been found. In the British Museum there are some wonderfully striking heads of several of the Emperors, and other men whose portraits have been handed on to us in monuments of stone, and upon coins and medallions, the die-sinkers of which so faithfully portrayed the men they pictured. The names of many of the most famous artists are known, and collectors rejoice over fresh examples of their handiwork. It is, however, the general characteristics of the Roman worker in metal as a whole that connoisseurs recognize and appreciate, and the true connoisseur is always searching for some greater artist's work than he has hitherto been familiar with. He is on the look-out for the very best among art treasures.

An amusing story has been told of a modern manufacturer who was very fond of inserting in his advertisements paragraphs calling attention to his modern works of art, which he said were "acknowledged by connoisseurs to be the best." "Father," said his little boy one day, "what do you mean by a connoisseur?" "A connoisseur, my boy," answered the manufacturer of copper goods, "is an eminent authority—an authority, in short, who admits that our goods are the best."

We are apt to look upon the beautiful brass grilles and copper lock-plates of mediæval days as the earliest examples of these metals in lock-making, the earliest locks found on old doors and muniment chests being chiefly of iron. But when we go back to still earlier times and examine the relics of Roman London, we find key-rings and keys of bronze, some very ornamental, too. One beautiful little key found near All Hallows Church has a bow terminating in a small spur. Another bronze key found near St. Swithin's, in Cannon Street, has a ridged annular bow, with a short square stem. Other keys are equally decorative; the locks, too, are in many instances ornamental, although in design and workmanship they fall short of the pinnacle of fame reached by the lockmakers in later Gothic times.

Romano-British Art.

Many readers in searching for curios of the Romano-British period in this country will recall the fact that the ancient Britons possessed bronze; and doubtless we should be doing an injustice to the more enlightened dwellers in Britain before Roman occupation, and contemporary with it, if we did not admit that possibly some of the relics of that period now dubbed Roman belonged to those more entitled to our regard, for Albion was their native land.

On the Thames Embankment, facing the Houses of Parliament, there is that famous bronze group perpetuating the memory of the British Queen Boadicea in her war chariot. The Romans made their famous paved roads as they pushed their outposts and line of camps farther north and west. The wheels of many British war chariots were made of, or hooped with, brass, and possibly the brass or bronze wheels, such as are represented in that group on the Embankment once covered by the flowing river, may have rattled over the roads made by the conquerors; such chariots, with their appointments of bronze and ornamental horse trappings, showed much skill in their fashioning. A poet gives voice to their use in the following lines:

"On the bright axle turns the bidden wheel
Of sounding brass, the polish'd axle steel."

A Well Staged Exhibit.

It is scarcely necessary to remind readers that there is a peculiar attraction in a well staged exhibit—public or private. A case of Roman and still earlier bronzes may be made attractive by an arrangement giving a gradation of subject and inclusive of the plainer types with the more delicately formed ornamental trinkets. A very fine example of how to arrange such a collection is seen in one of the rooms in Stafford House, the new home of the London Museum. The entire collection, representative of various periods of the Roman occupation of Britain, so carefully mounted, is worthy of close inspection. It includes many rare pieces, one being an early Roman lamp, which was found in Greenwich and is said to be unique among London curios. Indeed, it is probable that none so fine, nor of exactly the same design, has been found in England. This we are able to reproduce (see [Fig. 50]). The newly arranged London Museum is likely to be a rendezvous of Londoners and their friends from the country, for not only are there early antiquities in copper and brass, but many fascinating curios arranged in historical sequence, showing the development in metal-work as it was fashioned by London smiths and founders, and the progress made by other craftsmen as kings and queens came and went and the London as we know it to-day was being evolved.