Centre for the Study of Art & Travel
Art and Travel Lectures
Lecture Series: Art and Travel in the Mediterranean, 1600–1900
The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean - Samuel Johnson, 1776
In the history of British travel since the late sixteenth century, the Mediterranean has always played a prime role and inevitably captured the imagination like no other European region. Travel to the Mediterranean was stimulated by its art and architecture and in return inspired new art, architecture, collecting and art criticism. Images drawn, painted or photographed on these journeys by a diversity of travellers – artists, antiquarians, scientists, ethnographers, diplomats, navy personal, amateurs and tourists, to name just a few – have fulfilled a whole variety of purposes. This lecture series, organised by the National Maritime Museum’s Centre for Art and Travel and generously hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre, attempts a new overview on the subject from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.
Lectures
26 November 2009: The Origins of the Grand Tour and the Discovery of Art
Edward Chaney, Southampton Solent University
Read abstract and biography
10 December 2009: 'Present under the rose...' Stratford Canning, his Greek artist, and the last chance to see Turkey before the Tanzimat
Charles Newton, former Curator, Victoria & Albert Museum
Read abstract and biography
21 January 2010: 'These inhuman trafficers in flesh & blood' : British artists and the slave trade in Egypt
Briony Llewellyn, Independent Art Historian
Read abstract and biography
4 February 2010: Revolving Mirrors: Britain and Spain from the Armada to the Spanish Civil War
David Howarth, University of Edinburgh
Read abstract and biography
18 February 2010: ‘Hellas… in one living picture’: British artist travellers in Greece
Jenny Gaschke, National Maritime Museum
Read abstract and biography
Location: Seminar room, Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3JA.
18.00 start
19.00 drinks
19.30 exit
Nearest tube stations include Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street or Russell Square.
Booking: Free of charge and no need to book, but if you wish to reserve a place, please ring Janet Norton, Research Administrator on 020 8312 6716 or research@nmm.ac.uk
Abstracts and Biographies
The Origins of the Grand Tour and the Discovery of Art
Edward Chaney, Southampton Solent University
26 November 2009
Abstract
Although traditionally associated with the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour originated in the transition from religious to educational travel and was established in all but name by the early seventeenth. In particular, the travels of the ‘Collector’ Earl of Arundel and his wife, who chose to have Inigo Jones to accompany them, set a precedent that prevailed for more than two centuries. Where relics were once sought after, works of art were eventually collected in vast quantities in the quest to validate Britain as the heir to Rome.
Biography
Edward Chaney is Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts at Southampton Solent University. He had published several books on the Grand Tour, the history of collecting, Inigo Jones and Anglo-Italian cultural relations. He also has interests in twentieth-century British art. He is currently working on ‘The Idea of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Europe’.
‘Present under the rose...' Stratford Canning, his Greek artist, and the last chance to see Turkey before the Tanzimat
Charles Newton
10 December 2009
Abstract
Stratford Canning, in common with previous ambassadors, wanted a set of illustrations of his sojourn amongst the Ottomans. He commissioned a talented artist, an Ottoman subject, Greek in origin, to record their architecture, manners and customs. This series of pictures would become arguably the best and most varied visual record of the last period of unalloyed Imperial splendour, before Sultan Mahmud II introduced his Westernising reforms.
Biography
Charles Newton was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, from 1969 until retirement in 2005. He has published books and articles, organised exhibitions and lectured on a wide variety of subjects, including Victorian genre painting, the history of printmaking, the Searight Collection, Orientalism, John Frederick Lewis, nineteenth-century design, British textile designs, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser, and contributed to many exhibition catalogues. His special interest is in pictures of the Middle East, particularly Turkey, and has published various articles and reviews on this subject.
'These inhuman trafficers in flesh & blood': British artists and the slave trade in Egypt
Briony Llewellyn
21 January 2010
Abstract
The paper will consider how British artists travelling to Egypt in the nineteenth century reacted to the practice of slavery, both in the market and in the home. It will show how their preconceived ideas, derived from the stories of the Arabian Nights, and their moral scruples, shaped by Abolition, were tested against the reality they encountered on the ground. While there, they expressed the mixture of horror and fascination that they felt in both verbal and visual terms, and on their return distilled their perceptions into images presented for public display in the British market place.
Biography
Briony Llewellyn is an independent scholar specialising in British artists’ depictions of the Near and Middle East. She worked on the catalogue of the Searight Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1985-88. She has contributed to numerous catalogues and publications including the exhibitions of Edward Lear, 1985, Amedeo Preziosi, 1985, David Roberts, 1986 and Black Victorians, 2005. Most recently she has been loans consultant for Tate’s Lure of the East. She has published several papers on John Frederick Lewis and is currently working on a full-length study of his life and work, as well as continuing her research for the Eastern paintings and drawings section of a catalogue raisonné of David Roberts.
Revolving Mirrors: Britain and Spain from the Armada to the Spanish Civil War
David Howarth, University of Edinburgh
4 February 2010
Abstract
David Howarth surveys the pattern of British travelers in Iberia from the embassy of the Earl of Nottingham in the early seventeenth century to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
He explores the impact of war and commerce on how the British came to understand the Peninsula, and considers the fascination British travelers had with Andalusia. The habits of collectors and the impact of travel writing will be considered as an influence on the topographies of travel.
Biography
David Howarth is a Reader in History of Art at Edinburgh University. In 2008 he published The Invention of Spain (Manchester University Press), and in 2009 was Guest Curator of The National Gallery of Scotland Exhibition, 'The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso'.
‘Hellas… in one living picture’: British artist travellers in Greece
Jenny Gaschke, Curator of Fine Art, National Maritime Museum
18 February 2010
Abstract
This paper explores the role of travel - and travel drawings in particular - in the construction and interpretation of Greece at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The so-called ‘Rediscovery of Greece’ as a cultural historical phenomenon rested on the paradox that ancient Greece had remained part of the Western imagination since the Renaissance while its topographical identity and diverse ethnic and religious communities had been absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. After 1800 British artists such as the painter Hugh ‘Grecian’ Williams began to confront the experience of travel in Greece and to explore the picturesque potential of what they saw. This pictorial Greek landscape, which followed specific rules of both stylising and memorializing the ‘ancient’ and the ‘exotic’ and at the same time assimilating them, could fuel European aspirations of ownership of its cultural (and political) heritage.
Biography
Dr. Jenny Gaschke is Curator of Fine Art at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where she has worked since 2005. After her PhD at Humboldt-University, Berlin, in 2003, she was assistant curator at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Her academic interests lie in European landscape painting since the seventeenth century, and nineteenth-century travel art. She is Head of the National Maritime Museum’s research Centre for Art and Travel (‘CART’) and her publications include works on British travel to Greece in the early nineteenth century (2006), Dutch and Flemish maritime art (2008) as well as Edward Lear in Egypt (November 2009).
