Exhibit:

Medieval Ruins and Nationhood in Romantic-era Travel and Popular Culture

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The architectural patrimony of the Middle Ages received greater attention in the Romantic era because of three major factors. The first was the boom of domestic tourism beginning in the 1790s as a result of political tension on the Continent. The second involved the association of ruins with a growing sense of national pride in the beauty of the countryside of Great Britain, a sense developed in pastoral poetry and in the picturesque aesthetic. The culture of antiquarianism and preservation of artifacts belonging to Britain’s past constituted the third factor. Emphasizing material remains as sites of historical unity, ruins of Norman castles and ivy-covered Gothic abbeys moved into the national spotlight. These sites evoked a variety of responses in viewers, and the following is an outline detailing the modes of interaction of Romantic aesthetic theorists, antiquarians, and tourists with medieval ruins.

Credits: 

Brandon Cook

Exhibit Tags: 

Images in this Exhibit

Dover Castle from a Market Stall on Castle Street

Exhibit Description:

The centrality of Dover Castle and its integration into the surrounding landscape demonstrate the centrality of medieval structures in constructing national identity during the Romantic era.

Dover Castle from a Market Stall on Castle Street
Main Description: A woman in a black cloak with a young bonneted girl behind her stands in a covered, open-air market filled with baskets of fruits and fresh goods. The woman grips a large basket of grapes and looks toward someone who appears to be a young boy. This short figure, perhaps the store attendant—in a...
Views of Pevensey Castle

Exhibit Description:

These various views of Pevensey Castle highlight the connections between the history of medieval Britain and constructed political unity.

Views of Pevensey Castle
Main Description: Page thirty-two displays eight views from the ruined ground of Pevensey Castle. All images are black and white wood prints. 


105.—General View of the Ruins of Pevensey Castle is a wide horizontal panorama of the entire castle structure, featuring...
Richmond Castle, from the River Swale

Exhibit Description:

In this image, situated in the bottom left corner of the page, Richmond Castle is perceived from an enchanting spot along the River Swale. While highlighting the link between a knowledge of the history of medieval Britain and the construction of political unity, this view introduces the element of domestic tourism, a popular pastime of the Romantic period.

Richmond Castle, from the River Swale
Main Description: 360.—Richmond Castle, from the River Swale, placed in the bottom left corner of page eighty nine, depicts the castle as seen from the banks of the Swale river. A bridge extends from the right side of the image over a smoothly flowing river; a small village of white, peak-roofed houses sits...
Grand West Entrance, Jedburgh Abbey, September 19th, 1846

Exhibit Description:

David Roberts’s Grand West Entrance, Jedburgh Abbey, September 19th, 1846—both the most recent and arguably the most radical composition of images displayed in this gallery—is significant to an examination of Gilpin’s theories of the picturesque for several key reasons. The choice of subject, a crumbling medieval monastery situated on the border between Scotland and England, can be interpreted as a temporally and spatially liminal place; the presence of the ruins collapses not only the present and the past, but also the national identities of the English and the Scottish. Jedburgh Abbey is a British space that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, foreign and domestic. An abbey that over the course of its existence housed both Scottish nationalists and English monarchists, as well as divinely inspired abbots like Kennoch (J. Morton, The Monastic Annals 6), Jedburgh is a triple symbol of political strife, nationalistic desires, and religious devotion. As a painter of ruins and ecclesiastical buildings in Scotland and England, as well as on the Continent and in the Holy Land, Roberts becomes the quintessential painter of ruins, turning his attention to both the domestic and the foreign. This particular watercolor is intriguing: the grand entrance to the abbey is de-contextualized or divorced from the rest of the edifice and seems to appear suddenly out of the pristine white background of the canvas. The fragmentation of an already fragmented ruin is further emphasized by the seemingly random insertion of statuary remains in the right and left upper register of the painting. By zeroing in on the arched doorway and isolating it from the rest of the abbey, Roberts de-familiarizes the abbey to the extent that it serves to represent any medieval edifice to the untrained viewer.

Grand West Entrance, Jedburgh Abbey, September 19th, 1846
Main Description: The Grand West Entrance to Jedburgh Abbey is at the perfect center of the composition. The sequence of intricately carved arches framing the comparatively small, rectangular door creates a tunneling effect, drawing the eye of the viewer to the center of the door. The brown block of color marking...
View of Warwick Castle from a Distance

Exhibit Description:

Warwick Castle and its Guy Tower were prominent structures in England's national and tourist culture. Fielding's rendering of the site reflects these sentiments.

View of Warwick Castle from a Distance
Main Description: Fielding’s "view" of the castle occurs at sunset, and is taken from the banks of a river flowing in the lower register of the painting. A large tree seems to grasp the right riverbank with its visible roots; this bank of the river is relatively high terrain, and drops steeply to the water in a sort...
Wilton Castle

Exhibit Description:

This ideal arrangement of Wilton Castle and its surroundings exemplifies William Gilpin's mode of Picturesque composition.

Wilton Castle
Main Description: This scene is depicted from the low perspective of a river. In the right foreground, two trees extend their branches over the river. A structure with arched openings sits on the opposite bank; this edifice and a cluster of trees compose the middle ground. The upper register features large cloud...
Abergavenny Castle

Exhibit Description:

These Welsh ruins blend into the countryside, symbolizing the close connection between medieval architecture and picturesque beauty.

Abergavenny Castle
Main Description: The image depicts a broad, flat plain, interrupted at its further end by a grey body of water. In the distance, a low mountain range looms in vague, dark contours against the sky, nearly touching the cloud formations above. Small, white buildings, dwarfed by the mountains, cluster on the plain...
Raglan Castle

Exhibit Description:

This historically artificial ruin does not look like a ruin. Raglan Castle serves to reveal a part of the compositional practices of the picturesque aesthetic.

Raglan Castle
Main Description: The façade of a brick structure—with a sidewall jutting out to form a kind of corner—and a tree with a serpentine trunk take up the right half of the oval-shaped image. Light shining through the arched portal punctuates the façade and illumines the patch of grass before the entrance. A blind (...
Dunster Castle

Exhibit Description:

This view of Dunster Castle and a pair of tourists highlights the importance assigned to the interaction of persons with natural or constructed elements of the landscape in Romantic-era tourism.

Dunster Castle
Main Description: In the center background, a man-made structure—appearing, though distant, to be composed of walls and towers—crests an imposing promontory. To the right of this bluff a high, wooded hill rises to the top corner of the image; trees cluster at its base. Two human figures appear on a hillock in the...
View of the Tamer River

Exhibit Description:

The small votive chapel along the Tamer River is so nestled in the surrounding mountains that the landscape appears to absorb it. This seemingly organic mingling of land and man-made structures was highly valued by the picturesque aesthetic.

View of the Tamer River
Main Description: A broad expanse of river fills the foreground of the image, narrowing in the center ground and stretching away from the viewer. A rocky bluff—descending in steep gradations to the water's edge—fills the left portion of the image. Shrubs and trees are sparse on its rocky face. Further to the left...