Exhibitions: The Aesthetics of Travel: the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime

The Grand Tour - The Romantic Period (Novelty)

Although an appetite for foreign adventure gave impetus to touring during the Eighteenth Century, to some extent, one course towards appreciating landscape during the Romantic Period was the quest for "novelty".

“...I have some very "magnifique" Albanian dresses the only expensive articles in this country they cost 50 guineas each & have so much gold they would cost in England two hundred. -I have been introduced to Hussein Bey, & Mahmout Pacha both little boys grandchildren of Ali at Yanina. They are totally unlike our lads, have painted complexions like rouged dowagers, large black eyes & features perfectly regular.”
(Byron, 1993)


Travelling popular routes on a grand tour was widely believed to deliver certain guaranteed sights and experiences. For example, William Wordsworth and Robert Jones toured Europe together in 1790. Wordsworth's particular interests lay in seeing places he had read about: such destinations as the Grande Chartreuse monastery, the Ravine of Gondo, and the Schaffhausen Rhine Falls. (Gill, 1990)

Brimham Rocks (Nidderdale, North Yorkshire)

(Click to see a larger version)
Brimham Rocks (Nidderdale,
North Yorkshire)

A variation on the theme of novelty is seeking transformations in the landscape: actually returning to a place to look for what is new in fresh views of unstable objects, such as deciduous foliage, or weathered stones.

The loss of rural thoroughfares through enclosure acts caused some people to place emotional importance upon remembered routes and places. It follows from David Hume's arguments, in A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40), that places are transformed in recollection because ideas and impressions would have combined, in the imagination, to produce an inaccurate, or unfamiliar, impression of a once familiar place. (Hume, 1911)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed the imagination was creative, arguing for a secondary imagination which dissolves the material of experience in order to recreate. Therefore, journeys and places are transformed by memory. (Coleridge, 1975)