H

Halaf

See Mesopotamia

Hallstatt

See Austria; Switzerland

Hamilton, Sir William

(1730–1803)

Hamilton was born into the British aristocracy, becoming an equerry to his foster-brother, the Prince of Wales, later King George III. After serving in the army in Holland, he married a wealthy wife and was briefly a member of Parliament until 1764. At that time he was appointed the British envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary at the court of Naples in southern italy. He was popular at the court, and with little diplomatic work spent most of his time pursuing his interests in volcanoes and antiquities.

Hamilton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1766. He published his observations on volcanoes and presented a collection of volcanic earths and minerals to the british museum. Nonetheless, his interest in geology gradually gave way to his passion for the Greek and Roman antiquities of southern Italy. He purchased the outstanding Porchinari family collection in Naples, which he sold to the British Museum in 1772, founding the museum’s department of Greek and Roman antiquities. Hamilton also published inventories and pictures of other collections of artifacts, helping to create the fashion for collecting the antiquities of greece and Rome among the English and European aristocracy and wealthy middle classes during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Hamilton spent almost forty years in Naples assembling collections and then selling them. He never saw himself as an antiquarian or an archaeologist. Instead, he valued antiquities as models for modern artists, which also justified his funding of the excavation and plunder of cemeteries, and of Roman sites such as pompeii and herculaneum. His second collection was sent to England in 1798, and a third was partially lost when the ship carrying it went down. These collections greatly influenced the styles and fashions of the day—from architecture and furniture to fashion and fine arts, with Josiah Wedgwood reproducing elements from them