James Giles, Porcelain Painter

Giles was of French Huguenot descent,  his grandfather Abraham,  a silkworker, having fled Nimes from the oppression of King Louis XIV at the end of the 1600s – he and his wife became naturalised Britons in 1699-1700.  James’s father,  also James,  was a painter of china and brought up his son in that trade.  He is noted as being of the Parish of St Giles In The Fields,  in the county of Middlesex (now central London). 

On Monday May 7^th 1733, James’ son James was apprenticed to John Arthur of the Parish of St. Martin-In-The-Fields, a jeweller.  He was to work for Arthur for seven years,  and pay for his apprenticeship the sum of £30,  and the tax of 15 shillings.  He completed his apprenticeship in 1740.  Five years later on the 4^th July 1745 he took the lease of a property in Worcester,  in the parish of St Clements.  In 1756 he took up a workshop with its own kiln in Kentish Town,  London.  In 1763 he moved his workshop to 82 Berwick Street in Soho.  This was to be his centre of operations until 1776.  There is a variation in the spelling of his name, he was referred to as James Gyles in the rate books but later as Giles, which is how he is known to posterity.

In 1767 the Porcelain Factory in Worcester arranged to send their wares to his workshop in Soho.  This would enable them to exploit the ready market for porcelain amongst the London rich. It seems reasonably likely that there was a continuous relationship between James and the Factory dating from the time of his holding a workshop in Worcester twenty years before.  James had a showroom in the Arts Museum,  Cockspur Street where he would show the finished porcelain. 

In 1771 he took up a sub-let from George Stubbs,  the famous painter of horses, on a nearby property also in Cockspur Street at the cost of £110 per year.  There were many repairs and alterations to be done and this led to him having to defer payments for a time.  At this time he took up a partnership with a Mercer named John Higgons almost certainly to deal with the commercial side of his business.  Higgons had promised £650 to Giles but died suddenly not long afterwards,  with the money unpaid.  The debt was in the hands of Higgons’ executors and this was to be to Giles’ ruin.  Despite being a man of means,  his financial affairs were in a tangle.  Another business partner of Higgons,  one George Weatherby a London businessman who had dealt in porcelain for some time,  similarly suffered for his association.

Giles was at this point apparently prospering.  His goods were valued by his insurers in August 1771 at £300 (household), £100 (clothes) and £2000 (utensils and stock). In November 1772 these had risen to £400 (household) and  £2500 (stock and utensils).  The utensils and stock of the entire Worcester Factory only came to £680.

However he never recovered the money he was owed and began to borrow heavily from several people, including no less a figure in the porcelain industry than William Duesbury.  He sold his share of the business to Higgons’ executor,  a Mr. Randall. He undertook some work for Duesbury at this time.  Embarrassingly he was sued by the Worcester Factory for non-payment of £12.6.2.  This was discharged in 1778 with £2.2.0 court costs.

He died on 8^th August 1780 having lost all his assets.  He was buried in the family vault in Paddington Old Churchyard on 18^th August.

As described so eloquently in the book ‘Vanity Fair’ by William Thackeray,  the skilled craftsmen of England were at the mercy of the feckless aristocracy whom they relied on for custom.  Men like Giles were to learn to their cost that high living customers frequently left their bills unpaid.  Tradespeople were reluctant to press for prompt payment, for fear of alienating their customers.  Another problem Giles encountered was that handcrafted work was of necessity expensive – he could only sell to prestige customers to whom price was not an issue.  Josiah Wedgewood,  already a prominent Porcelain producer in North Staffordshire,  and also experiencing this difficulty, would solve this problem by embarking on new methods of mass-production.

Mary Giles was employed as a painter along with her sister Sarah-Teresa (1742-1800) and many others in her father James’s ‘atelier’.  The entire family had for three generations been steeped in the tradition that would become embodied in what was to become Royal Worcester porcelain. 

Mary’s future was secure with her husband John Hall who in addition to being a successful engraver was a fun-loving character judging from his letters,  which are full of descriptions of drinking,  eating,  trips to the seaside at Lewes in Sussex,  where like many fashionable Georgian gentlemen, he would bathe, take the air, or shoot birds.  Engraving was a lucrative business – although regarded as craftsmen not artists,  the engravers of the late eighteenth century earned more than the artists whose work they rendered,  as their work was far more time-consuming.  Mary added to her prodigious skills, assisting her husband in the elaborate preparations of engraving. 

John Hall was a witty and lively correspondent, a very affectionate father and very attentive to the needs of his children.

Mary gave birth to a daughter, Julia.  She was to grow up as part of a well-travelled,  cosmopolitan family who moved in talented artistic circles. 

Mary,  another daughter of John Hall, married the composer Stephen Storace on the 23^rd August 1788.  Storace’s father,  also a musician and composer, originally arrived in Dublin from his native Italy, in the 1760s and whilst there, formed a friendship with the Thomas Sheridan, father of the playwright and impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  Storace senior was also a friend of Thomas Linley with whose daughter Elizabeth, a famous singer, Sheridan junior famously eloped.  The Storace family moved to England some time later. Richard Sheridan and Linley were the joint owners of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in the 1780s to the early 1800s. Sheridan wrote famous plays such as The Rivals and School For Scandal.  The stage of the Theatre Royal was the scene of many of  Storace’s triumphs,  indeed according to ‘Stephen Storace – English Opera In The Late Eighteenth-Century London’ by Jane Girdham his productions propped up some of the less able competition also on show at the theatre. 

The Storaces were family friends of the Mozarts and also of the composer Haydn. Mozart performed works by Storace,  and vice versa.  Mozart (tenor) and Haydn (violin) accompanied Nancy on at least one occasion.  Haydn visited the Storaces in London in the 1790s, though sadly Mozart never made the trip.

Storace wrote two ‘opere buffe’ for Vienna and one for London,  but he also wrote sixteen operatic pieces in English and a ballet.  He adapted the Italian operatic style to the English stage,  converting the English audience to the more sophisticated stylings of the continental opera scene whilst accomodating English sensibilities.  However his career as composer was certainly overshadowed by the singing career of his sister,  such was her reputation.

Sadly Storace died young in his thirties in March 1796.  Storace’s widow Mary married the clergyman John Kennedy,  (another grandson of Thomas Kennedy of Lichfield) who was at that time vicar of Kimcote, Leicester.  The death of Stephen Storace was a terrible blow for his father in law John Hall who followed him to the grave not long afterwards.  He had been very proud indeed of his talented son-in-law and had moved house to be near him.  The theatrical world gathered at Drury Lane Theatre for a benefit performance for Storace’s widow and child,  but the gesture was sadly marred afterwards by the behaviour of Richard Sheridan who helped himself to the fund then refused to hand over the money to the Storaces.  This was probably due to his own intermittent financial problems – a similar incident had occurred a few years earlier.  Mary Hall wrote bitterly of this episode in a letter.  Eventually Storace’s family were to receive a large portion of the money raised,  after threats of legal action. The bitterness remained.  It was a sad end to what must have been a great friendship – the Storaces had named their son after Sheridan. Sheridan had built his empire at Drury Lane on loans and dodgy deals and was increasingly struggling to cover his extravagant lifestyle.

During this time in the mid 1790s,  as the stormclouds from France were gathering and war was looming, Julia Hall met and married the young Birmingham curate and schoolmaster Rann Kennedy,  the only son of the late Benjamin and Damaris Kennedy.  Stephen Storace’s son Brinsley later attended King Edward VI school in Birmingham,  where Rann was the usher  or deputy headmaster.  The Kennedy family were close friends of the family of Joseph Burchell who was the solicitor for the Storaces and was executor of their wills.  Joseph was married to another daughter of John Hall, Sarah Jemima. 

Brinsley Storace took up an apprenticeship to an Architect but died in March 1807 before he could complete it.  Storace’s sister Nancy died of a fever some time after her brother,  at her mothers’ in Herne Hill on 24^th August 1817.  She had lived with the tenor John Braham for many years.  In her chequered life she had been the Prima Buffa, the great singer of her day, not only in London but also in Vienna and Italy.  She had allegedly had a string of liaisons with various men and been the subject of a scandalous rumour-mongering book.  She had possibly killed her own baby by neglect.  She was survived by her son,  William Spencer Harris Braham who later became a Church of England clergyman,  perhaps through the influence of the Reverend Kennedys. There is a striking paradox regarding the seemingly upright Kennedy clergy of the Midlands and their connections with this artistic chaotic London demi-monde of The Drury Lane Theatre. 

Drury Lane Theatre was a place where all classes met, from prostitutes and thieves, to the merchant class, artists and aristocracy. It was the biggest cultural institution in London, and was the meeting place of radicals including Sheridan who was a campaigning Whig MP, Charles James Fox, Burke and others. The Prince Regent was part of this circle. The theatre was a wild place where the audience could turn on a play, destroy the confidence of an actor, throw fruit at and even invade the stage.