Turner and the Grand Tour - five online talks by Simon Rees

The main goal of the Grand Tour was to visit Rome. On the way, the traveller would stop at such cities as Paris, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Milan or Florence, before going on perhaps to Naples and Sicily, or as far as Athens. Travellers from Britain were generally rich and noble, and often accompanied by a ‘bear leader’ or tutor given the job of keeping the young charge under control and supervising his education. Purchasing paintings and other works of art, both antique and modern (and often fake) kept a number of painters in business. Among those were the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson, and the scandalous landscape artist and caricaturist Thomas Patch, whose satirical portraits of the Inglesi abroad are some of the best records we have. Horace Walpole corresponded with friends, and these letters colour our knowledge. James Boswell also travelled on the Grand Tour, and recorded his experiences.

Tobias Smollett and Lawrence Sterne each travelled towards France and Italy (although Sterne never made it to Italy) and wrote entertainingly about the hardships of the journey, the difficulties of transport and accommodation –bumpy carriages, terrible roads, unsafe sea vessels, unreliable couriers – for the education and amusement of their readers. At this time Turner was studying art (from the age of 14) under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and becoming familiar, through casts and originals, with Greek and Roman sculptures, which were in themselves the great goals of the Grand Tourist.

The fall of the French monarchy and the rise of Napoleon meant that travel for the British in Europe was severely restricted. However, Turner managed to make several trips to Paris during a lull in hostilities in 1803, when he was able to study in the Louvre. He painted and sketched landscapes and architecture throughout his travels, working up finished oil paintings from his notebooks. At the same time, Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, inspired by Napoleonic enthusiasm, also visited Paris and recorded their impressions.

With the intensification of the wars in Europe, it became difficult for British travellers to visit Europe. However, Byron managed to skirt the hostilities and make his way to Albania and then to Greece, where he became involved in the fight for national freedom. In Switzerland and Italy, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley stayed with friends and visited Venice, Florence and Rome, where John Keats also went in futile search of better health, dying there of tuberculosis and being buried in the Protestant cemetery. Shelley drowned off Viareggio, and was cremated on the seashore in the presence of Byron and Trelawney. Turner made his first visit to Venice, Rome and Naples in 1819-20, painting and sketching landscapes and buildings.

These were made in 1828-29 (a long visit to Rome), in 1833 (a lengthy sojourn in Venice when he stayed at the Hotel Europa in the Ca’Giustiniani, making pencil and watercolour sketches later worked up into oil paintings) and in 1840, when he made his third and longest visit to Venice, staying again at the Hotel Europa. During the same period John Ruskin, who was both artist and critic, made several visits to Venice and other Italian cities, and began writing his studies of Byzantine and Medieval architecture which transformed the view of British visitors to Italy – who could now travel comfortably by train – of the masterpieces to be seen there. By this time, foreign travel was no longer the unapproachable luxury it had once been, and was more within the reach of people of more modest means – Dickens and Browning, who both wrote of their travels – and who set the route for Grand Tourists of later generations.