A fine pair of Bardin/Edkins 18in 19th Century library globes.

A fine pair of mid 19th Century terrestrial and celestial globes by S.S. Edkins & Son (Successor to the late T.M. Bardin) Salisbury Square, London, and dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, Bar, KB, President of the Royal Society, 1852. Each on a mahogany stand with a turned column to splayed down swept legs united by a stretcher and containing a compass.

Provenance: William Bardin became a freeman of the Leathersellers’ Company in 1775 at the age of 35 and transferred one year later to the Girdlers’ Company. For unknown reasons Bardin moved into globe making c. 1780, in association with Gabriel Wright . The first globes published by Wright and Bardin of 9 and 12 in. diameter, are dated 1 January 1782 . The collaboration between the two seems to have ended by 1794/5 when the Bardin firm moved from Hind Court to 16 Salisbury Square, on the opposite side of Fleet Street. The business was continued there by Bardin and his son, Thomas Marriott Bardin (1768-1819), who in 1783 had been apprenticed to his father. After becoming a freeman in 1790, Thomas Marriott joined his father’s firm in the partnership of W & T. M. Bardin. Around 1798, theglobe production of the Bardin firm was extended to include a pair of 18 in. globes. These new British globes were made in collaboration with the firm of W and S. Jones . A few years later, another pair of 12 in. globes appeared, now carrying the name of T. M. Bardin only, since the elder Bardin had died in 1798. The globe production of Thomas Marriott Bardin was taken over by Elizabeth Marriott Bardin (1799-1851), his daughter, in 1820, a year after her father’s death. After her marriage in 1832 to the silversmith and member of the Cutlers’ Company, Samuel Sabine Edkins, the globes were sold with the label of ‘S. S. Edkins, son-in-law to T M. Bardin’. A son of Edkins” (from an earlier marriage) joined the firm in 1848, at which point its name was changed to ‘S. S. Edkins & Son’. A few years after S. S. Edkins’s death in 1853, the firm was closed.