The capture of the Westmorland

One of the pleasures of going to work in a less familiar place (for me currently Yale) is that you find new books. They are often books that are available in your own usual habitat, but for some reason you just don���t notice them. (The cheap comparison is with going to a new supermarket, where the layout of shelves and aisles simply makes you notice stuff that was probably in your trusty local Sainsbury/Tesco/Waitrose all along��� but never sprang to the eye.)

Anyway thanks to the Yale Center for Britsh Art, I have had my nose rubbed in a book I should have been using for ages. In fact, it is the catalogue of an exhibition that was for a while at the Ashmolean in 2012, and I never noticed. So doubly remiss.

It is The English Prize, which documents the contents of a ship that sailed from Livorno in 1778 and was soon captured by the French and taken to Malaga, where the contents were inventoried ��� and most ended up being bought by the King of Spain (and still in Spanish collections).

And what were these contents? Well, a good number were crates being sent home to England by men on the Grand Tour, and give us a good sense of what they were actually buying in Italy (and, yes, there is one Roman emperor���s head���).

There���s been a lot of good work recently on this kind of material, trying to get a bit beneath the over glamorizing (or over critical) version of this whole cultural phenomenon. They were not only bringing back vast quantities of ancient sculpture. A lot more people were involved than just the really upper-crust (servants, companions, tutors, and a range of travellers who were just a bit (not much, but a bit) more ordinary than we take them to be. And they were certainly not all as easy dupes of smart Italian dealers as they are often painted ��� the dumb English mi���lord syndrome.

What is wonderful about this book (and presumably about the exhibition that it records) is that it gives you a real-life glimpse into what a group of them (how random, we don���t know) were actually sending back.

Some of it is high art, in oil paint and sculpture. But it���s the variety that is striking. So the crates dispatched by Frances Basset (above) not only contained the portraits of Basset done by Batoni, but some rather less expensive souvenirs, such as a nice painted copy of the ���Aldobrandini Wedding��� and some Piranesi prints (not to mention his copy of Tristram Shandy, which he was presumably sending back home, well read). Penn Assheton Curzon meanwhile had picked up a nice print of Raphael���s School of Athens, and some mineral samples which he had picked up in Naples; and Frederick Ponsonby was consigning back home a small collection of fans, some elegant architectural prints, plus a variety of musical scores (probably taken with him for music making on the Tour). There���s a kind of feeling of taking a peek into someone���s 250 year old luggage.

It���s a tremendous catalogue, and not of the slightly dumbed down modern version, with nice pictures, some essays but no proper entry for each object. A ���book of the exhibition��� as the husband puts it, rather than a ���catalogue���. This has all the nice pictures and essay, but a chunky discussion of each piece. Go get!