I saw this rusty fireback advertised on a Somerset auction website recently. The photograph betrays little about its design or any decorative elements upon it, all I could make out being at least one initial letter near the top, its shape, rectangular with canted top corners, and that there was a raised line running across it. Other decorative features were only hinted at. It bore a resemblance to a series of firebacks associated with a founder whose initials were IB, about which I had previously written a short article, A Series of Distinctive Firebacks. The auction estimate was £20-£50 but I was not in a position to go and view it or to attend the auction to bid for it in person. So I put in a bid up to a modest maximum figure and crossed my fingers. Come the day of the auction, the hammer price was within the auction estimate and so I had bought another fireback. As firebacks go it was of modest size and easily fitted into my car boot when I went to collect it a few days later.
When I got the fireback home I was able to examine it and stand it in my garage in a position where the light shone on it at a raking angle. There was indeed a triad of initials, IBE, as well as several other recognisable stamps that also figure on the IB series. The possibility occurred to me that maybe IB had made this fireback for himself and that the triad of initials in the top panel were for him and his wife, the middle letter of such an arrangement customarily being that of the surname. The earliest fireback in that series, seen here on the left, does not bear IB’s initials but in the pentagonal panels in the top corners are two rampant lion stamps, one facing to the left and the other to the right. Flanking the date – 1699 – are double fleurs-de-lys, below each of which is a flower head. All of these stamps were on my newly-acquired casting as well.
In my fireback’s central panel are two rather indeterminate stamps, which might depict animals but which corrosion has rendered somewhat featureless. Another fireback in the IB series, dated 1703, seen here on the right, at the National Trust property of Greys Court, near Henley-on-Thames, has the figures of two monkeys in the central panel (with what significance I have yet to fathom), but this fireback is substantially larger than mine and the Greys Court monkeys are proportionately larger as well. However the shapes of both of the figures on my fireback bear a passing resemblance to them, so perhaps they are also images of monkeys, albeit half the size.
What is satisfying is that the chance I took on the barest of photographic evidence, that the fireback at the auction was from the IB series, has been proved correct. Unusually it has slightly splayed sides, but it is the only back in the series that is undated and, like the 1699 casting, it does not have IB’s initials either. The fleur-de-lys and the flower head have only been noted on it and the 1699 back, suggesting that it was probably cast at around the same time, at the end of King William III’s reign or beginning of Queen Anne’s. The rampant lions are also on two later firebacks in the series, dated 1706 and 1708. All of these backs probably emanated from a furnace in Gloucestershire, where the division into sections by vertical and horizontal lines is a distinctive feature of backs made in that period.
