It was the memorial service today of Victoria Press, the most wonderful, formidable and directly spoken American collector who lived on Cheyne Walk and died in early April in her palazzo in Venice.   We had our last lunch with her not long before in Tessa Traeger’s little dining room in Rossetti Studios:  avocado and shrimps and cheese and crème caramel;  all Victoria’s favourite things.   Towards the end of lunch, she reminisced about how, having worked for Claire McCardell, the designer of sportswear, she arrived in London from New York in the late 1940s and fell in love with England – the buildings which turned half black in the rain, the broken-down pavements, the English who made friends with her, including Robert Heber-Percy, the ex-partner of Lord Berners and owner of Faringdon Park, who introduced her to English upper class life.   Then, we said our farewells.

Robert Wood, who was Dawkins’ partner in visiting and recording the antiquities of Palmyra, was a bit older, the son of an Irish Presbyterian minister, educated at Glasgow University and later registering at Padua, after a period as a travelling tutor.   He first visited Syria and Egypt in the early 1740s.   He met Dawkins in Rome whilst working as private secretary to the Earl of Milltown.   Their travels in the eastern Mediterranean were a serious research trip.   They equipped their boat with a library of ‘all the Greek historians and poets, some books of antiquities, and the best voyage writers’, took with them tools for digging and, following the model of Desgodets’ measurements of buildings in Rome, undertook detailed drawings of classical remains, together with maps and reconstructions.   Not only was Wood author of The Ruins of Palmyra and The Ruins of Baalbec, but he also published an Essay on the Original Genius of the Writings of Homer, first written as a letter to Dawkins in 1755 although not published for twenty years.  

In reading about the ghastly massacres and destruction of the museum and statuary in Palmyra, I have been finding out more about James Dawkins, who undertook some of the research and helped finance Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desart, which brought Palmyra to the attention of eighteenth-century students of the antique.   Dawkins came from Jamaica and, after Abingdon School and St. Johns College, Oxford and on succeeding to his family estates, he set off to travel in Italy in 1742.   He set out from England again in 1749, met Robert Wood in Naples and chartered the Matilda to travel round the Mediterranean with G.B. Borra, the Turin architect, as draughtsman.   They arrived in Palmyra on 14 March 1751 and spent five days (fifteen days according to their book) measuring and drawing plans of the temples and recording inscriptions.   The Ruins of Palmyra was published two years later when Dawkins was visiting Berlin in an attempt to get Prussian support for a Jacobite rebellion.   It was a key text in the revival of the antique, influencing Robert Adam in his designs for Osterley, Syon, Bowood and Compton Verney and William Chambers who reproduced The Temple of Venus at Kew.   All that they recorded so meticulously is now in the process of being destroyed.