Capturing the (Grand Tour) Scene
Some months ago, I reviewed the novel Headlong on here, which tells the story of an art historian pulled along by an exciting archive trail to identify a lost Bruegel painting. I thought of this again the other day when a friend commented on hearing about my time in America that a PhD involves much more detective work than she had thought. If only I was able to achieve the superhuman levels of archival work that Frayn’s character seems to get through in Headlong!
The research project behind the Ashmolean’s current exhibition, The English Prize: The Capture of theWestmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour, do seem to have achieved those levels, however. The exhibition tells the fascinating story of a British cargo of Grand Tour antiquities captured by the French during the eighteenth century and subsequently dispersed across Europe. Through painstaking work in a myriad of archives and collections, the team has been able to locate many of the dispersed pieces, and reconstruct the history of their movements. The exhibition showcases some of the British collectors who lost treasures in the capture, their attempts to regain them, and the roles that these objects would have played in town and country houses. A panel in the final room shows the tense and ongoing nature of such detective work, with the fate of a secret consignment of relics sent by the Pope to Lord Arundell having only just been pieced together. Ironically these were the only objects on the Westmorland ever to make it to England!
The English Prize contains the germs of a wealth of stories. As an eighteenth-century historian, you can read not only the complex nature of grand tour networks and collecting, the political entanglements of eighteenth-century conflict, and the agency which such objects held within those, but also the ongoing complexity of the history of collecting through the subsequent stories of these objects and how they have been discovered. There are some nice touches in the exhibition display, which give a sense of this, particularly I felt, the use of different owners’ monograms from the original crates and inventories as sort of code markers for visitors to follow the trail of their collections.
Yet, I felt overall, that the exhibition fell short of its incredible promise. The design reminded me, somehow, of a Dan Brown novel, with photographic table-surfaces of documents. While the idea of making the cases resemble packing crates, and the object texts packing labels, could have worked it felt gimmicky. The section highlighting some of the collectors who lost items in the Westmorland was confusing, requiring you to double back around a central case in order to see each collector’s section as a whole. If the idea was to show the overlap between these collectors, that was interesting but not made sufficiently clear. Likewise, it wasn’t obvious to me why the sculpture had largely been segregated in the last room away from the paintings, prints and books. Given that one underlying theme was the highly integrated way in which grand tourists built their collections, this seemed an odd choice.
When I was at the YCBA in early August the special exhibition galleries were shrouded in bustle and mystery, preparing for The English Prize to move there in October. I’ll be interested to hear how the narrative works in such a different space, and whether connections will be drawn to this new setting within the colonial history of eighteenth-century Britain.