Travels across Europe in the eighteenth century: the unique case of Spain

My doctoral thesis, Art and Artists in the Westmorland. A Unique Case of the Grand Tour, considered the antiquities and works of art shipped from Italy to England aboard the Westmorland, an English frigate that sailed from Livorno to London in the second half of the eighteenth century. They had been acquired by Grand Tourists whilst in Italy, and were destined for their collections in England. The Westmorland was intercepted by two French ships and escorted to Málaga (Spain), where the vessel and her cargo were acquired by King Charles III of Spain. The works of art and antiquities never reached their rightful owners. As a result, the majority of the works is today located in various museums and art institutions in Madrid.

My aim during this four-month stay in Rome was to find more information about an Irish sculptor who was the subject of one of the chapters of my thesis. I studied sculptured busts currently located in Madrid by Christopher Hewetson. This Irish artist, who is virtually unknown in Spain, has not been the subject of a comprehensive study yet, despite the high quality of his work and the prestige that he enjoyed (until his success was marred by the arrival of Antonio Canova on the Roman art scene in the second half of the eighteenth century). To date, the most complete published work has been by Brian de Breffny (‘Christopher Hewetson, concise biography and preliminary catalogue raisonné’, Irish Arts Review 3 (1986), 52–75), and although it has been common to find works by the sculptor in recent exhibitions about the Settecento or Neoclassicism in eighteenth-century Rome, the investigations never go beyond the compilation of catalogue citations of the artist's well-known pieces. In A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive, by John Ingamells (London/New Haven, 1997), great efforts were made to gather information about the artist. Nevertheless, considering that Hewetson arrived in Rome in 1765, and remained there until his death in 1798, it is surprising that the information available is so sparse. During my time at the BSR, the most noteworthy highlight was, without a doubt, discovering the artist's will and property inventory, both of which shed important light upon his life and work. The publication of this project will be fundamental to the history of this artistic figure and will help future researchers to make new discoveries.