This gallery explores the work of artists and explorers in Mexico and Central America between 1804 and 1844. Romantic explorers visually constructed Mexican history, archaeology, and geography in relation to Romantic conceptions of the picturesque landscape. Their depictions were further complicated by the contemporaneous tension between the visual technologies of the panorama and the camera lucida. Consequently, explorers in Mexico were forced to negotiate between the cultural implications of Romantic visualities—of the sublime and of the picturesque—and the values of Romantic exploration and enlightenment, such as encyclopedic recording and faithful representation.

Few cultural phenomena captured the popular imagination of late eighteenth-century Britain more intensely than the rage for air ballooning, or the “balloonomania” as critics sometimes called it. “The term balloon is not only in the mouth of every one, but all our world seems to be in the clouds,” declared a 1785 book titled London Unmask’d (137). The excitement had begun in France when the Montgolfier brothers launched the first human flight in front of the Royal Family and 100,000 spectators, on October 15, 1783. The first flight in England, by Vincento Lunardi the following September, attracted an estimated 150,000 spectators. The Morning Post reported that “St. Paul’s Cathedral took the advantage of Lunardi’s Balloon excursion, by raising the price, which used to be only twopence for going to the top, to two shillings, and both the galleries had a great number of spectators, many of whom in the stone gallery fell down the recesses and broke their shins, as they...

Epitomized by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Watching a Sea of Fog (c. 1817-18), and the Wordsworthian peripatetic, the gentlemanly or artistic wanderer is integral to the Romantic imagination. Wandering lies at the heart of picturesque sightseeing, blank verse poetry, specimen collecting, and the Romantic cultivation of self. However, these forms of sanctioned wandering exist against a backdrop of less desirable movements that, nonetheless, inform, color and at times literally converge with the endorsed amblings of the inquisitive artist-gentlemen. Unsanctioned forms of wandering existed on a spectrum of criminality, which at times included peddlers, actors, shepherds, discharged soldiers, beggars, orphaned children, gypsies, sailors, highwaymen, and pirates, among others. These disparate groups, while often meticulously differentiated, were also increasingly amalgamated as vagrants through a series of common burdens and discriminatory practices, resulting from the...

During the Romantic period, India was one of Britain’s most prized colonies. From the establishment of the East India Trading Company in 1600 to the mid-nineteenth century, these two cultures were inextricably entwined as a result of the exchange of goods such as textiles, spices and crafts; this initially commercial exchange eventually facilitated and occurred alongside the exchange of ideas and people. This gallery is made up of images of India drawn by William Daniell and bound in his book, The Oriental Annual (London, 1834-40), and also includes miniature paintings done by Indian artists working in the Company style. The Company style paintings have been characterized as hybrids in which Indian artists employed techniques such as shading, linear perspective, and a subdued color palate to transform their more “traditional” art—which tended to be abstract, mythical, and brightly colored—into manifestations of the “picturesque...

The artwork of Sir George Back, Royal Navy explorer of the Canadian Arctic, invites our reexamination of the paradigms of Romantic visual culture via its depiction of the “otherness” that the Arctic represented to the British during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the difficulty of physically navigating that landscape. A compelling combination of the picturesque, sublime and “true-to-nature”—a combination sometimes found in just one image—Back’s artwork is almost equally aesthetically and scientifically driven, and as such walks a peculiar line that evades merely imperialist, picturesque, sublime or scientistic tropes. In walking this line, Back’s work offers an aesthetics of the pragmatic that anticipates John Dewey’s conception of art; in this configuration, art does not “create the forms” in a landscape, but rather employs “selection and organization in such ways as to enhance, prolong...

In late-18th and early-19th century Britain, popular interest in "scenes" that exceed or lie beyond the everyday world was heightened by factors such as the emergence of London as Europe's first world-city; James Cook's and George Vancouver's voyages of discovery, which completed in outline the modern map of the globe; and improvements in transport and communication technologies, which brought the distant into the orbit of the near. The consequent appetite for large scenes, evident in the cult of the sublime, was met in part by new virtual-reality technologies—most notably the Eidophusikon, Panorama, Moving Panorama, and Diorama—and an entertainment industry based on them. Thesenew medi a typically conjured an illusion that seemed so real audiences felt they had been transported, during the time of performance, into the world it represented. With these developments in mind, the following gallery introduces a diverse variety of works in order to map some of the myriad, often...

During the Romantic era, tourism—and picturesque tourism, in particular—gained popularity across the Continent. While William Gilpin’s enormously popular British domestic tours were circulating in the 1780s and 1790s, an intense debate about the nature of the picturesque was being waged, partly in response to Gilpin’s “authoritative judgements” on the topic (see Stephen Copley's essay "Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque" in Prospects for the Nation, ed. Michael Rosenthal, et. al, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997; 133). Aesthetic theorists such as Uvedale Price (one of the leading writers on the topic and author of the 1810 piece Essay on the Picturesque) and Richard Payne Knight, author of the 1805 An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, criticized Gilpin’s conceptualization of picturesque landscape viewing as “illogical” and “inconsistent,” suggesting that the picturesque could not be understood as a single aesthetic...

This gallery is a virtual stroll through the crowds of Romantic Britain in search of personifications of artistry. As an exercise in flânerie, this gallery juxtaposes and assembles for our view those figures who fashion themselves as artistic through their clothing, conduct, and gestures. These figures demonstrate the diverse ways in which artistic identity was being codified for appropriation and commodified for consumption, and so point to the multiplying intersections of art and commerce. Although the Romantic artist is often thought of as a stable embodiment of creative genius and sensibility who creates his artistic persona to elevate himself above the commercial masses, the growth of the art market during the Romantic period actually encouraged a wider range of artistic identities as professional artists began to specialize in diverse practices (see David Solkin's Painting for Money; New Haven: Yale UP, 1993). The people represented here take part in this fracturing...

Through images culled from two Romantic-era guidebooks, this gallery examines two early public museums in England: the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford and the British Museum in London. Although both museums underwent major reorganizations and redistributions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, their foundational collections emerged from the diverse and curious tradition of Wunderkammern, or “wonder cabinets.” The gallery looks into the revised second edition of John and Andrew Van Rymsdyk’s Museum Britannicum, published in 1791, and Philip Bury Duncan’s A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum, published in 1836, as visualizations of what Susan Stewart calls “the narrative of the collection” (see On Longing; Durham: Duke UP, 2003; 156). The narrative of these museums that emerges from the visual culture of this transitional period—from private to public collections, expansiveness to order—is fraught with anxiety, fragmentation,...

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.

Even in a setting evocative of the mundane—such as that of laborers working through the night in JMW Turner’s Keelmen Heaving Coals by Moonlight, or in the refreshing daytime setting of Richard Parkes Bonington’s Seapiece: Off the French Coast—the sea suggests something more significant in the works of many Romantic-era artists. Whether it be the fading edge of a barely distinguishable horizon, the careful rendering of shadow and light, or the movement captured in the foaming wave, these artists capture a certain mystery, a volatility, in their depictions of water which suggests the power of nature as a whole. This series of images not only conveys the enigmatic nature of the sea, but also implies the subsequent connection between harnessing such a power and establishing a nation’s pride. For an era still learning what lay within its depths and beyond is horizon, the sea held eternal potential, and so the battles waged over who could...