What? Seminar on Collecting & Display, Visual Knowledge and the Grand Tour: the Print Collection of Walter Bowman
Grant Lewis, Researcher, British Library
Where? Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St London, WC1 E
When? Monday 12 February 2018 at 6pm Pollard Seminar Room, N301, Third Floor
_______________________________________________________________
The Grand Tours of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long proved a rich field for historians of collecting, and increasingly this is as much the case for acquisitions of ‘lesser’ arts like prints as for the celebrated purchases of painting and sculpture. Indeed, over the past few decades several Grand Tourists’ print collections have been the subject of in-depth investigations, and in a new contribution to this body of work, this paper will focus on the collection of the Scottish tutor and antiquary Walter Bowman (1699-1782). Surviving in several carefully curated and presented albums of French and Italian views in the National Library of Scotland and the British Library, each with their own fine manuscript title-page, this collection has been totally overlooked by print scholars, so much so that the two proudly signed volumes in the British Library go unmentioned in Bowman’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Yet this is a significant, indeed rare, collection, for unlike the better studied Grand Tour collectors Bowman was not a tourist as such but a cicerone, a guide for foreign travellers, and as a result his collection has a different character from the latters’ aristocratic ones, containing rudimentary and worn out impressions as well as fine art prints, not to mention a distinct function as a dependable educational resource. By bringing together all of the surviving volumes owned by Bowman, this paper aims to provide the foundational study into this intriguing collection, its formation, display, use(s) and ultimate fragmentation, which saw the parts now at the British Library enter the collection of George III. To this end, it will make use of archival research into Bowman’s little-studied papers, in particular his European travel diary (now Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale), which, covering the same locations as the print collection, demonstrates how visual and textual knowledge were ‘collected’ simultaneously, and devised to complement each other.
Since 2015 Grant Lewis has been at the British Library, as part of the fledgling prints and drawings team at the British Library responsible for cataloguing King George III’s Topographical Collection, a vast array of some 40-50,000 prints and drawings dating from the 1500s to the 1820s.