Two English instrument makers, music publishers and sellers, father (d ?London, ?1722) and son (b London, ?1671; d London, ?1743). They were active in London from the 1660s to 1743. Richard Meares the elder was possibly the leading maker of viols of his time; he also made lutes and other string instruments. His instruments are usually distinguished by their tasteful purfling and woodwork, and high-quality varnish. He may have been the teacher of Edward Pamphilon, Barak Norman and Nathaniel Cross. Instruments can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (bass viol, c1677), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (bass viol, c1682), and the Dolmetsch Family Collection, Haslemere (alto viol, c1668). Richard Meares the younger is credited with few instruments, and these tend to be of the violin family, then newly fashionable in society.
The firm sold music, and advertised it from at least 1699, but seems not to have begun publishing (defined as being named in the imprint) until 1714, when it issued Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin, as Hawkins records; Hawkins also suggests that it was the eponymous son who developed the publishing side of the business. From 1717, when publishing began in earnest, to 1724 the Meares firm was one of Walsh’s rivals, and each copied the other’s publications. The firm’s best publications rank among the finest of the period, and include Croft’s Musicus apparatus academicus (1720), Handel’s Radamisto (1720; see illustration) and Suites de pièces pour le clavecin (1720), Ariosti's Il Coriolano (1723), John Church’s An Introduction to Psalmody (c1723), and sonatas by Castrucci, Corelli, Geminiani and others. Thomas Cross often engraved the plates of the firm’s publications.
The two Richard Meares should not be confused with a typographical music printer named H. Meere, who printed one or two works for Walsh in 1716–19, or with W. Mears, a bookseller active about 1713 to 1734, who published the text and music of several ballad operas and some editions of the Psalms with music.
HawkinsH
C. Humphries and W.C. Smith: Music Publishing in the British Isles(London, 1954, 2/1970)
W. Henley: Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (Brighton,1959–60)
D.M. Kessler: ‘Viol Construction in 17th-Century England: an Alternative Way of Making Fronts’, EMc, x (1982), 340–45
B.W. Harvey: The Violin Family and its Makers in the British Isles (Oxford, 1995)
D. Hunter: Opera and Song Books Published in England, 1703–1726: a Descriptive Bibliography (London, 1997)
PETER WARD JONES, DAVID HUNTER