Browsing by Subject "Grand Tour"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Letters from a Young Painter Abroad: James Russel in Rome, 1740-63
    (Walpole Society, 2012) Kelly, Jason M.
    James Russel was an English artist and antiquary who lived in Rome between 1740 and 1763. At one time he was among the foremost ciceroni in Italy. His patrons included Richard Mead and Edward Holdsworth. Andrew Lumisden, the Secretary to the Young Pretender, wrote that Russel was his 'ingenious friend'. Despite his centrality to the British Grand Tour community of the mid eighteenth century, scholars have virtually ignored him. Instead, they favor his fellow artists, such as Robert Adam and William Chambers, and other antiquaries, such as Thomas Jenkins, James Byres, and Gavin Hamilton. Nevertheless, Russel's career gives insight into the British community in Italy at the dawn of the golden age of the Grand Tour. His struggles as an artist reveal the conditions in which the young tyros laboured. His rise to prominence broadens what we know about both the British and Italian artistic communities in eighteenth-century Rome. And, his network of patrons reveals some of the familial and political connections that were necessary for social success in eighteenth-century Britain. In fact, the experience of James Russel reveals the importance of seeing Grand Tourist and expatriate communities as extensions of domestic social networks. Like eighteenth-century sailors who went to sea, these travelers lived in a world apart that was nevertheless intimately connected to life at home.
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    The Portraits of Sir James Gray (c1708-73)
    (2007) Kelly, Jason M.
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    Reading the Grand Tour at a Distance: Archives and Datasets in Digital History
    (Oxford, 2017-04) Kelly, Jason M.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    This essay uses Giovanna Ceserani, Giorgio Caviglia, Nicole Coleman, Thea De Armond, Sarah Murray, and Molly Taylor-Poleskey’s essay “British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture” as a point of departure from which to examine the limits and potentials of digital history, especially as it relates to the construction of archives and digital datasets. Through a critical reading of the sources used to create the Grand Tour Project—part of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford University—it shows the ways in which datasets can both hide and embody hierarchies of power. Comparing the Grand Tour Project to other digital projects currently in production, such as Itinera and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, this piece offers suggestions for alternative readings of the Grand Tour narrative. It ends by summarizing a series of challenges faced by historians as they contemplate best practices for creating and maintaining digital datasets in the twenty-first century.
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    Society of Dilettanti (act. 1732–2003)
    (Oxford University Press, 2006) Kelly, Jason M.
    The Society of Dilettanti was founded by a group of gentlemen who met each other in Italy while on the grand tour. Thus travel to Italy, and later Greece, became a requirement for membership. The word dilettante is of Italian origin and its adoption by the society to refer to a lover of fine arts is its first recorded use in English.