The cameo dates from 1771, ordered from the artist when William Constable (1721-1791) was in Rome on his Grand Tour. In a letter to William Constable later that year the dealer and antiquarian James Byres (1734-1817) refers to the cameo that he had already dispatched in the hands of Sir Edward Swinbourne (1733-1786), also on his Grand Tour and about to return to England. Whilst the intaglio portrait and the sulphur impression are not then documented, the intaglio is recorded amongst William Constable’s gems and both were presumably sent with the cameo portrait.

Johann Anton (Giovanni) Pichler was the son of a gem engraver from the Tyrol, born in 1734 in Naples and who died in Rome in 1791. The art of gem engraving has its origins in antiquity. Mostly of postage-stamp size, the two types of gem carving are: Cameo - carved in relief from a multi-layered hard or semi-precious stone so that the design is raised in a contrasting colour to the background. Intaglio - carved below the surface of the stone providing a mirror image and commonly used as a seal, a type also referred to as a seal-stone. Always highly prized, numerous ancient gems survived for centuries in collections and there was renewed interest in the Renaissance, when the obsession for the Antique led to a revival of gem engraving.

The enthusiasm for antiquity in the eighteenth century which resulted in thousands of, mostly, young gentlemen embarking on a Grand Tour to Italy lead to further revival, and Giovanni Pichler was one of the most celebrated gem engravers in Italy. Since the tools and techniques used differed little over thousands of years, Pichler and other gem cutters could produce cameos and intaglios in the style of the ancients and copying and faking was commonplace.

William Constable inherited a collection of some 90 engraved gems through his stepmother Elizabeth Heanage (d.1766) and then acquired more from Rome when his neighbour and future brother-in-law Philip Langdale (c.1724-1813) of Houghton bought on his behalf whilst in Italy on a Grand Tour with his friend Edward Howard (1744-1767) in 1763-5. These included gems by Giovanni Pichler as well as other ancient and modern intaglios, as recorded in a letter from James Byres to Philip Langdale 28 September 1766.

Besides these, William Constable also commissioned a large (unidentified) cameo of by Giovanni Pichler, referred to in a letter of 1771: ‘Young Pickler has been here all this summer at work in the country, he came to Town yesterday and deliver’d me your large Cameo of four Figures which he says is the greatest and best work he ever did. I believe it is.’ In addition, for William Constable Pichler carved a Sacrifice to Priapus (modelled on a sculpture by Michel Clodion) and also copied an ancient Leda and the Swan, both in cornelian intaglio.

William Constable thus came to own some ten gems by Giovanni Pichler. The large collection of engraved gems at Burton Constable was sold sometime around 1950, with the red sulphur impression remaining amongst the thousands of other gem casts at Burton Constable. The sulphur impression was reunited with the cameo and intaglio seal when both were repatriated to the collection at Burton Constable with the aid of grants from the National Art Collections Fund and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund.