MACC5: A mahogany wheel barometer with a 10 inch dial and swan neck (or scroll) pediment , signed Ortelli & Co Macclesfield, is recorded by Nicholas Goodison in his book English Barometers 1680-1860. I have not seen an image of this instrument but I include it because for a time it was the only Macclesfield specimen with a swan neck pediment to which I had found a reference. Goodison gives no idea of the date, but, given the other Macclesfield instruments, it is not unreasonable to attribute it to the period before 1825.

THE  1805/1806 QUESTION

       What is exceptional about this group of barometers is that eight of them are engraved with a date, and that date is, in six cases, 1805 and in two cases, 1806.   In the next section you will find  another  Ortelli with a date, but that is 1817 and it's signed Ortelli Buckingham. It is, as Oxleys noted above, very rare to find any barometer with an actual date; most have to be dated by reconciling the style with the records that prove or suggest when the maker was working at a particular address.  And that is not an exact science for even the experts. To find so many dated barometers, all signed Macclesfield and all by one family of makers is amazing. But not everyone is convinced that 1805 or 1806  refers to the date when the instruments were made, and I have to share those doubts.

Why would a maker engrave eight barometers with any date that was not the date of making? Logically, the barometers were engraved at the time they were made, perhaps even before they were sent or taken to Macclesfield. So they should all date from 1805 or 1806.  Once sold, they would have gone to separate homes and never come together again.  That rules out a later conspiracy to forge the date.

If  dating a barometer by a maker is so unusual, why date this particular batch, and why 1805 or 1806?
It could be that 1805 was the first year in which the Ortellis made/sold barometers under their own name in Macclesfield (or anywhere else, for that matter) and they wanted to mark it by dating the first batch 1805.  Moreover, 1805 was a very significant year: Battle of Trafalgar and death of Nelson. That had a huge effect on people, not unlike that caused by the death of Princess Diana almost 200 years later, and Nelson didn't have anything like the same media to whip up hysteria.  If the barometers were all made late in the year, engraving 1805 would be a little way of marking this great event. Owners could say "I bought it in the year of Trafalgar". End of story, surely?  

If only...


Apart from the fact that 1806 doesn't have the quite the same resonance as 1805, the doubts initially hinged primarily on the inclusion of the dated Sheratons illustrated above - Nos. MACC 7, 11, 16 18 and 22. 1805/6 falls into a period of experimentation in the design of wheel barometers - not in the inner workings but the in shape and decoration of the cases. The typical Sheraton  shell barometer became popular from 1810 and dominated from 1815 into the 1820s.  You might  argue about  two of them, but not all.  MACC7 and MACC22, for example, are very much from the very early 1820s  with their longer shoulder (the part of the case between the bottom of the pediment and the start of the slender neck)  where, in the Sheraton, the upper  flower inlay was positioned.  It's noticeable that the length of shoulder increases during the first three decades of the 19th century; the early ones have very little shoulder and  it often flares harmoniously into the pediment.  The bezels of early 19th century barometers go much closer to the edge of the case than they do even just a decade later. If 1805/6 really  is the date is the date of making of all six, it completely overthrows the accepted wisdom regarding the dating of Sheraton shell barometers. But if you accept that argument, you would have a problem with known working dates of other makers. The 1805 date of the cistern-tube stick barometers, many of them very standardised instruments, has also been questioned stylistically and could be brought forward towards 1815. 


So, if not the date of manufacture, what could 1805 mean? Could it refer  the Ortellis themselves, giving a slightly later message to potential clients that "we, the Ortellis, have been in business making/supplying good barometers since 1805 (or 6!)  and we are not one of those new arrivals who want to sell you inferior instruments."   (Modern dealers may also state when they were founded, in order to reassure clients  about their expertise and honesty). So why aren’t more extant Ortelli instruments signed with  that date?  Maybe the family was not that organised! Maybe it was the idea of one of the business partners, not of all of them.  Maybe the idea failed. If you, as the customer, have just bought a new barometer, you wanted it to look new, not give the impression it was not  merely old-fashioned but might even be second-hand.   Only now is antiquity a desirable quality and most of us would love to have a date on our barometer!  Especially if the style matched the date!

The easiest solution to the problem is based on a piece of information that you will find on the next page, where you'll read that in 1813 Peter Ortelli sold up his business to move to a 'distant' but unnamed county. So one could  date all the Macclesfield barometers, dated and undated, to around the 1813-1815 period and assume that the 1805/6 dates refer to the establishment of one or more of the Ortellis in the business.
 However, a caveat is thrown up by a couple of the 4-glass instruments (undated).   Because of its likeness to the Lanhydrock House barometer owned by the National Trust,  Macc4 may have to be dated to around 1805. I get very conflicting views on whether a four-glass barometer could be as early as 1805. Banfield has a number of examples of such instruments, all  by quality makers,  which are dated to circa 1805-1807. Some experts put such instruments into the late 1810s-1820s period.

Comments on the dating puzzle on a postcard, please. Or, this being 2014, via the email contact form on my homepage.  They really will be gratefully received and  incorporated.
 

AND SO TO LONDON AND OTHER TOWNS...

As we know the barometer making community was based in London, and Banfield recorded Ortellis in London. It was time to see what could be gleaned from the various records there. So click on the link below to the next page:The slightly less elusive Ortellis...