James Byres

[3] In 1758 he settled in Rome, where he studied painting and architecture and became a cicerone and an art dealer, mainly to Scottish and English gentlemen on the Grand Tour until his return to Scotland in 1790.

[3] 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.

[6] 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.

After the French occupation of Rome in 1788 many of the artworks and antiquities Byres owned were sent to the Magazin National de la Republique Francaise in Paris.

[3] Before he left the city 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.