Naval adventure, detective yarn, travel diary, shopping survey. You don’t normally expect to encounter these narratives at an art show. But despite the presence of paintings, prints, sculptures and such, “The English Prize,” at the Yale Center for British Art, isn’t mainly about looking at art. As suggested by its double subtitle, “The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour,” this show has many other things on its mind.
The story starts in 1778, when France joined the Revolutionary War on the side of the Americans. In the course of harassing British ships near the coast of Spain the following year, two French warships seized the Westmorland, a 300-ton “merchantman” sailing home from Italy, as a prize of war. Its English crew and passengers were exchanged for French and Spanish prisoners and its cargo sold, as was the custom. Insurers paid off the owners of the lost goods to the tune of £100,000 — about $210 million in today’s dollars — and the Westmorland’s bad luck was forgotten.
A couple of centuries later, in the late 1990s, scholars poking around in the archives of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid determined that the mysterious initials PY, inscribed on many objects in the collection, stood for Presa Ynglesa, the English Prize. Over the next decade, following leads in Spain, Italy, England and elsewhere, they pieced together the story of the Westmorland and its cargo.
In addition to silk, olives and 32 wheels of Parmesan cheese destined for London markets, the Westmorland had carried crates of books, maps, pictures, statues and other souvenirs being shipped home by English travelers on the Grand Tour. These make up the bulk of this varied show — an inlaid marble tabletop here, pages of sheet music there, and in between, watercolor views of the Alban hills and lakes near Rome by the English landscape painter John Robert Cozens and a bootleg edition of Laurence Sterne’s entertaining novel “Tristram Shandy.”
By the 18th century, the Grand Tour had become a rite of passage for young men of the British upper classes. Accompanied by tutors, they spent months, sometimes years, acquiring firsthand knowledge of the European arts, languages and even sciences. Along the way, they sat for oil portraits and busts, commissioned work from the fashionable artists of the day, and bought rarities, copies and fakes.
The Westmorland’s hoard, most of which landed at the academy in Madrid, comprises all this and more. And for “The English Prize,” the dispersed contents of several of its crates have been reassembled, allowing us to discern not just the tastes and interests of the Grand Tourists in general, but those of specific individuals as well.
For example, in a portrait by Pompeo Batoni, Francis Basset, heir to a Cornwall tin and copper fortune, leans on a classical plinth with a map of Rome in his hand and the dome of St. Peter’s in the background. He looks quite the serious fellow, and the objects he shipped home included classical statuary, architectural drawings and Piranesi prints. But that saucy Sterne novel belonged to him, and so did the proto-romantic watercolors.
Another traveler who sat for Batoni — the go-to painter for Englishmen in Italy — was George Legge, Viscount Lewisham. His father, the Earl of Dartmouth, had been painted by Batoni some 25 years earlier, but the son’s portrait seems to have been something of a splurge. His other purchases were more modest. One, a small, skillful copy by an unknown artist of Raphael’s tenderly religious “Madonna della Seggiola,” from the Pitti Palace in Florence, stands out among all these artifacts of the Age of Reason.
The Grand Tour was not only about art and ideas, however. Frederick Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon, sent home painted fans and fanciful ceiling designs with classical motifs. And lacking cameras, the travelers had to buy pictures of the sights they were so busy seeing. These images will look both familiar and startling to modern-day travelers. The Alpine scenery at Chamonix, the ski resort in France, betrays no sign of winter sports. The Arch of Titus, in Rome, stands ruined amid remnants of later brick walls. Glowing lava from Mt. Vesuvius paints the night red in a hand-colored print.
To the Englishmen who bought them, the works were travel mementos; to us, they are vehicles for a trip through time. They are also collateral damage from the war that gave us independence. And clues in a scholarly mystery story. And, yes, shopping.
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