The Laboratory of the Picturesque

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tourist Destination ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Dolomite Rock

This chapter reconstructs the context of the geographical discovery of the dolomite rock and the position of the so-called Venetian Alps in the geological debates of the first part of the nineteenth century. This discovery will provide British travellers with a new picturesque toolkit to appraise the geomorphology of the Dolomites in architectural terms and promote them as a new tourist destination. The ingredients of that promotion were neither entirely British nor entirely contained within the experience of the Venetian Grand Tour. Before being ‘invented’ the Dolomites needed to be ‘discovered’ – their unique landscape features needed to be noticed before they could be seen. They needed to be placed on a map.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

The Crimea between East and West according to Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century British Travelogues

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Nikita I. Khrapunov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Crimea

Following its annexation by Russia in 1783, the Crimea became a stage on the Western grand tour. Foreign travelogues informed their readers about the country, previously almost unknown in Europe. This paper addresses the British travelogues that played an important role in shaping notions of the Crimea and Russia's role in its history, many of which still exist today. The travellers created works of different kinds: unedited letters and journals, encyclopaedic descriptions, imagined journeys, and pseudo-correspondences. Their authors had varied levels of intelligence, motivations, and passions, intricately entwining empirical observations with stereotypes. Geographically located in Europe, the Crimea was understood as a country featuring distinctive features of the East. Its image possessed traits of paradisiacal nature, inhabited by naïve and lazy persons resembling Rousseau's utopia, with an extraordinarily rich archaeological heritage, the romantic culture of Islam, and various ethnic and religious types. The British offered plans for the establishment of Western colonists in the Crimea, as well as the development of communications, trade, agriculture, and industry. William Eton and Matthew Guthrie considered the Russian occupation of the Crimea historically progres-sive, which would bring prosperity and well-being to the country and its residents. However, Edward Clarke interpreted the Russians as the avatar of barbarism and developed a plan to return the peninsula to the Ottomans. Some negative stereotypes originating from his book continue nowadays and are restated in periods of aggravated relations between Russia and the West.

Gender, Curiosity, and the Grand Tour

Journeys ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Anna P.H. Geurts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Social Models ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
At Home

Discussions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel have long tended to over-apply the model of the grand tour. It is increasingly recognized now that many British journeys to the Continent knew different motivations and itineraries, and were made from different subject positions than that of the young male aristocrat. An alternative model proposed for female travelers has its own limitations, however. It presents women as more open-minded than men, with a greater eye for detail and keen to escape patriarchal confinement at home. Yet female travelers’ wish and capacity to offer an alternative to the grand-tourist gaze was limited. Still, travel, travel writing, and publishing offered women a chance to explore new social models and lifestyles and develop new forms of personal independence.

The Rise and Fall of Cork Model Collections in Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 117-146
Author(s):  
Richard Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Secondary Market ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
House Museum ◽  
Architectural Models ◽  
Classical History

AbstractCommencing in the late 1760s, cork models of classical monuments in Italy were purchased by wealthy British collectors while on their Grand Tour. Initially commissioned by tourists with specific antiquarian and architectural interests, the models were an expression of the collector's knowledge of classical history and of their Neoclassical sensibility. Models soon appeared in the Society of Antiquaries of London and the British Museum, in the private displays of Charles Townley and John Stuart, Earl of Bute, and in George III's royal collection. In the early 1800s, architect John Soane began purchasing models from the secondary market for his house museum. Interest in cork architectural models waned during the Nineteenth Century. Descendants of the original owners transferred them to public institutions, while museums that had at first enthusiastically welcomed the donations or made their own purchases, relegated the models to storage. In the twentieth century the majority of the models were discarded or lost. This paper explores the reasons for the enthusiastic acquisition of architectural cork models and their subsequent demise.

Extra-illustrations to Charles Robert Cockerell’s Ionian Antiquities and James Cavanah Murphy’s Arabian Antiquities of Spain in the collections of the Gennadius Library and the Yale Center for British Art

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynda S. Mulvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Printing Process ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
British Art ◽  
Shed Light

This article focuses on unpublished extra-illustrations relating to two architectural monographs, currently in the collections of the Gennadius Library (Athens, Greece) and the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, CT, USA). The first section examines two unique copies of Ionian Antiquities (1769) by Richard Chandler, Nicholas Revett and William Pars, both grangerized by Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863); the second section considers a special copy of The Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) by James Cavanah Murphy (1760–1814). These enhanced volumes embody early nineteenth-century concepts of authorship and shed light on the working methodologies of their creators. In his personal copies, Cockerell noted differences in admeasurements of the monuments as recorded by Chandler and Revett for use in Neoclassical architectural practice, and brought to light new discoveries made during his Ionian Grand Tour. In Murphy’s own volume of The Arabian Antiquities of Spain, the supplementary sketches, drawings and additional illustrations enliven the plates, place them in context and inform the printing process.

scholarly journals Exploring the eclectic world of Richard White (1800-1868), 2nd Earl of Bantry, Lord Berehaven: collector | grand tourist | nobleman

2014 ◽  
pp. 24-31
Author(s):  
Seana Vida Farrington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
The Creation

This is how Nigel Everett describes Bantry House in his Irish Arts Review article of 2010. Overlooking Bantry Bay in West Cork the house enjoys one of the most favourable aspects of any of Ireland’s Big Houses (Figure 1). Everett’s words are a most apt description for the project of ennoblement envisioned by Richard White (1800-1868), 2nd Earl of Bantry, Lord Berehaven, and for the collection of art he amassed. As Berehaven travelled extensively he was often absent from Bantry. He visited the usual sites of the nineteenth century Grand Tour, also visiting Spain, Russia, the Baltics and Scandinavia. There were two activities he invariably participated in while travelling: sketching and collecting. The latter activity led to the creation of one of the most eclectic collections of art to grace an Irish home. Berehaven and his vision for Bantry House have not received sustained enquiry, which is a gap in ...

Reactions to modernity

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-126
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grene
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Modern Farming

Emigration, which had been such a marked feature of Irish history since the nineteenth century, accelerated through the 1950s, creating the sense of an emptying countryside. Leaving the land is represented as alienation in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Uprooted’, a tragedy to be resisted at all costs in M. J. Molloy’s play The Wood of the Whispering, while the plight of the stay-at-home sibling when all the others have left is the focus of William Trevor’s ‘The Hill Bachelors’. Nostalgia for a pre-modern rural landscape features in the work of Michael McLaverty, John Montague, and Maurice Riordan. In the fully urbanized Ireland of the twenty-first century, there is a sardonic take on modern farming in Kevin Barry, but the remaining connections to the land of contemporary society are still very much present in novels by Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright.

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