Guilford Puteal - History To The 19th Century

History To The 19th Century

It was used as a well-head after antiquity, either by a 19th-century Turkish owner or possibly earlier. This Turk displayed it the right way up, endangering the remains of the figures through friction of the well-rope against the marble. Its next owner was Notara, a cultured Greek official with a fine library who was a member of a distinguished family who could trace their descent back to the Byzantine Palaeologi; Notara also used it in his garden as a wellhead but inverted it in an attempt to save it from further damage. By the time it passed to him its upper moulding, much of the bead-and-reel decoration of its lower moulding, and (most likely from an act of vandalism of unknown date, perhaps related to iconoclasm) the heads of the figures moving in two processions around the drum had all already been lost.

In the earliest years of the nineteenth century Notara presided over a guest-house for western travellers to Corinth, by which circumstances the Guilford Puteal became known to western Europeans. While there it was seen by Edward Dodwell in 1805 and drawn by his artist Simone Pomardi, and was described by Dodwell in his account of his travels in Greece. It was seen by Colonel William Leake in 1806. Dodwell perceptively recognised its close links with a relief in the collection of the Villa Albani in Rome, catalogued in the eighteenth century by Winckelmann. Otto Magnus von Stackelberg also drew casts of it, which had been taken to Athens.

It was then acquired by Frederick North (later Earl of Guilford) in 1810 at Corinth. It was among the sixty crates of marble sculpture he shipped from Greece in 1813. These were for display at his London house in Westminster, which he never inhabited but which contained his library and collections; it was acquired with its contents on his death in 1827 by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, an MP and member of a Yorkshire family. It was he who moved it to Bretton Hall for display, possibly in the stables built in 1830 by George Basevi, better known as the architect of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.