The Grand Tour and the Global Landscape Tim Barringer
Fig. 1.
Rome from the Villa Madama by Richard Wilson (1714–1782), 1753. Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 by 52 ¼ inches.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
During the eighteenth century, wealthy and privileged Britons, such as the group portrayed by Nathaniel Dance c. 1760 (Fig. 2), hastened south, to drink at the font of European civilization in Rome amid the ruins of an earlier empire, and to absorb the classics in literature and art. Habits of viewing the landscape that derived ultimately from the Grand Tour determined the ways British artists and travelers framed their visual experience of the rest of the world. The Grand Tour thus lies in the ancestry of what I will call “global landscape,” the art of the British Empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British artists traveled south first to Italy, and then to the Pacific, and then across the globe. Wherever they went, they envisaged the wor
Patriotic appeal … A Flagship, Wearing the Flag of a Vice Admiral of the Red, Before the Wind off the English Coast, With a Cutter, a Ketch-rigged Sloop and Other Shipping, 1754, by Charles Brooking (H177.8cm x W312.4cm). Photograph: Foundling Museum
This dramatic painting by Charles Brooking hangs in the Picture Gallery of the Foundling Museum. Taylor White, treasurer of the Foundling Hospital at the time, commissioned the seascape in 1754. According to John Brownlow’s Memoranda or Chronicles of the Foundling Hospital, White had seen one of Brooking’s pictures in a shop.
Brooking painted this enormous picture – over three metres wide – in just 18 days, working in a room in the Foundling Hospital itself because his own garret studio was too small. The painting, Brooking’s largest, was intended to be a companion piece to Peter Monamy’s seascape An English Fleet in the Downs, which has been missing since the beginning
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It’s August, 1818, and two British naval ships are dodging icebergs in Baffin Bay on their mission to find the Northwest Passage. John Ross, commanding the HMS
Isabella, and William Parry in the HMS
Alexander are farther north along the western Greenland coast than any previous explorers. They assume this land of glaciers and stark mountains is uninhabited.
But they’re wrong.
They spy several figures running on a hill near shore. Ross assumes they’re shipwrecked sailors in need of rescue, and he steers the
Isabella to get closer. But they turn out to be Native people, a community of Inughuit living farther north than Europeans believed was physically possible.
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The 1814 burning of Washington, D.C.
Two centuries ago this past week, smoke and ash lingered in the air of what remained of our nation s capital. Mo Rocca takes us back to that fiery night:
Two hundred years ago this month, 4,000 British soldiers lay siege to Washington, D.C., and set fire to the U.S. Capitol and the White House.
A drawing of the White House after the fire of 1814. Library of Congress
And the burn marks on the White House walls are still there. We now have evidence of the char marks, the scorching that would have happened when flames were drawn out through open windows and doors and licked up around the tops of the stone, said William Allman, the White House curator.