A walk in the park “Excursions of Imagination: 100 Great British Drawings from the Huntington’s Collection” by Bondo Wyszpolski The Huntington Library…
“100 Great British Drawings,” a major exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, will trace the practice of drawing in Britain from the 17th through the mid-20th century, spotlighting The Huntington’s important collection of more than 12,000 works that represent the great masters of the medium. On view June 18 through Sept. 5, 2022, in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, the exhibition will feature rarely seen treasures, including works by William Blake, John .
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