Irish Arts Review
Lord Charlemont's Travels in Greece Author(s): Hugh C. S. Ferguson Source: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 33-38 Published by: Irish Arts Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492029 . Accessed: 26/05/2011 21:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iar. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
Jn 1746, JamesCaulfeild, 4th Viscount and later 1st Earl of Charlemont, set out on the Grand Tour, which was usually limited to France, the Low
Countries and Italy. Lord Charlemont followed this route, with an excursion intoGermany before travellingtoRome via Turin. He was to remain in Rome for the best part of eight years except for 1749, in which year he travelled in
the Eastern Mediterranean, visiting Turkey,Greece and Egypt.Returning to Rome, he was resident there 1750-55, and
formed
a circle
of
friends
Hugh Ferguson, Lecturer in ArchitecturalHistory at the Universityof Strathclyde, Scotland,andMember of the BritishSchool atAthens, who has travelledextensively in Greece andAsiaMinor, writes of LordCharlemont's tour there in 1749.
and
associates among the artistic commun ity, includingWilliam Chambers (who was
later
to
be
his
architect
for
Charlemont House, Dublin, and the at Marino1), Casino Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam. He also met (and
quarelled with) the great architect etcher, Piranesi. Lord Charlemont's travels inGreece and Turkey
are minor
in 1749 are remarkable on a
number of counts. Strictly speaking, the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century did not extend to Greece; late in the
century English travellers turned to as an alternative, when wars Greece with France closed that country and
Italy to the British. Thus Charlemont's visit to Greece was made fifty-odd years in advance of regular travel to the country. Very few Europeans and only a handful of English among them, had travelled in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the eighteenth
century;Lord Charlemont's travels thus belong to the pioneering exploratory phase. Greece
at that
time was
not
easily
accessible;moreover, it was unhealthy and dangerous. Pirates and bandits were a menace. The Turkish local governors were unco-operative and there were no passenger ships; passage usually had to be obtained on ships of the Levant or on naval vessels. Lord Company is also remarkable in that Charlemont he enjoyed complete freedom of move ment aboard his own ship. Being rich, he was able to charter a former French frigate captured by the British, named L'Aimable Vainqueur. Over two hundred tons, armed with cannon, and manned by a professional crew, Charlemont's ship sailed from Livorno in April, 1749, for Constantinople via Sicily and Malta. Lord Charlemont's travel diaries no
longer exist, but the itineraryfollowed by his party can be reconstructedon the
a new method of travel-writing,a claim which has somemerit. But other writers were to come alongwho were equally as interested in themodern inhabitantsof Greece as in the ancient, such as Guys (1771).3 Charlemont described himself as an antiquarian, rather than a scholar, though his knowledge of the classics was sound. Antiquities and classical epigraphywere two of hismain interests, and he made a collection of Greek inscriptions.On landing anywhere in Greek territory,almost his first enquiry was about the existence of old marbles. At Bodrum, on the Turkish coast north of Rhodes, he found, and correctly identified, sculptured blocks from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus,one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and was the first to correctly identify Bodrum as the site of the ancient Halicarnassus.While these discoveries
R. Livesay (d. 1823), James Caulfield (1728-1799), 1st Earl of Charlemont,1785,7lx53cms.,oil on canvas Courtesy National Gallery of Ireland, Cat. No. 4051.
ones
in the history of archae
ology, they are nevertheless remarkable for an amateuraged twenty-one. At Athens, Charlemont's draughts man, RichardDalton, was the first artist tomake accurate drawingsof antiquities in Greece and of the Parthenon in particular.When these were published in 1752 they were the first accurate renderingsof the design of theParthenon to circulate in Europe, though they were soon superseded by the more comprehensive publications of LeRoy,
of Sayer,4 and of the architects Stuart basis of two essays he wrote in later life, and Revett whose The Antiquities of diaries. There is a Athens (3 Vols., 1762-95), the result of developed in1Tuke from an his nteGekilns Greek systematic survey of the Essay and a Turkish Essay; a a two-year third essay on Egypt was intended, but ancient city and its monuments, marks never written. The essays remained un the beginnings of scientific archaeology inGreece. until 19842, and from this published Chreot eivd h addveoe edited version it is possible to attempt a Although Charlemont's expedition detailed reconstruction of Charlemont's had no specific scientific purpose, his route, though the exact sequence visit toAthens pre-dated that of Stuart of some of his ports of call is not clear, and Revett by two years. Charlemont's islands. His particularly in the Cycladic party made a measured survey of the essays were rewritten several times, and Parthenon plan in 1749; this was pub deliberately concentrate on contempor lished in 1752. Stuart and Revett did ary life and society in the various parts not arrive in Athens until 1751; their of the Ottoman Empire he had visited, measured drawings of the Parthenon to the exclusion of descriptions of were published in 1787, in Volume II of In this Charlemont is un antiquities. the Antiquities. Thus Lord Charle usual for his time, for the typical mont's visit earned a place in the eighteenth century travel book was the history of Athenian topography,albeit a In eschewing antiquarian travelogue. smallone. discussion of antiquities in favour of From the Renaissance to the mid life eighteenth century, Greek antiquity sociological commentary on modern
was, on the whole, viewed at one remove, through the art and architect -33
IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
ure of ancient Rome. While Greece remained relatively inaccessible, Italy, with itsmasterpieces of ancient art,was a regularresortof English travellers,and Rome their ultimate destination. From the 1750s, however, Greek art and architecture began to overtake Roman as the focus of antiquarianstudy, and in the latterpart of the eighteenth century interest in the antique tumed away from classical literature and textual study, to exploration and archaeology. On this wider front it can be seen that Lord Charlemont's travels in the Eastern Mediterranean were not an isolated adventure, but part of an evolving movement of discovery which was ultimately to reveal the reality of Greek art in its earlier and purer form, as opposed to the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman formswhich had helped shape the Renaissance view of Greece. The lead in promoting archaeological discovery
and
the study of ancient
Scott. Richard Dalton, Charlemont's draughtsman, was recruited after the party had set sail L'Aimable Vainqueur
Catania. The fact thatCharlemont met up with
and Charlemont
by
Stuart
and
choice as draughtsman may have been G.
expedition.6
i.W.Reynolds(1773-1835), JamesStuart (1713-88), etching,1795, aftera sketchby Sir JoshuaReynolds c. 1775 (since lost). Possiblya studyfor a Dilettanti Societyportrait,with Stuart inTurkishdress, (unpublished),author'scollection.
art
may have con
Revett's
plans.
However, it is possible that Lord Charlemont arrived inRome already set on the idea ofMediterranean travel, for en route
to Rome
he
had met
Lord
Sandwichwho had travelled inGreece, Asia Minor and Egypt in 1738-39, and discussed travel plans with him. Sandwich had made some rudimentary measured sketches of the Parthenon. It seemsmore than likely thatCharlemont reachedhis decision to followSandwich's example without prompting byWood or Stuart and Revett. It is also possible travel in the that he had discussed had who Lord Moira, Levant with travelled in Greece and the East at the
same time as Lord Sandwich; both were members of the Society of Dilettanti.
at this late
by chance
Borra, an Italian artist, who travell ed with Wood and Dawkins on their
sidered a joint venture, and that the Wood-Dawkins expedition was prompt ed
Dalton
stage tends to support the thesis that he was a last-minute replacement for some other artistwho dropped out. Circum stances suggest that Charlemont's first
after 1750 was taken by the Society of Dilettanti, which transformedthe study Quite a few of the early travellers in of Greek antiquities through its system Greek lands came from Ireland such as atic publications. Charlemont played a William Ponsonby, later Earl of Bess part in this work too, when he became a borough;5 Robert Wood, the classical member of the Society some three years scholar who travelled with Dawkins, after his return fromRome. was born at Trim, Co. Meath. Charle In thewinter of 1748-49 therewere mont's partywas Irish,with the except three journeys to Greek lands being ion of Dalton. Lord Charlemont's companions on planned inRome, Charlemont's travels, Stuart and Revett's Athens project, and his travels were the Rev. Edward Murphy, his classical tutor, Francis that of James Dawkins and Robert Wood. Pierpoint Burton (later Lord Conyng was already a seasoned traveller, Wood having been inGreece, Syria and Egypt ham), and Burton's friend, Alexander in 1742-43. It has been suggested that Wood
in from Livorno and had put in at
Thomas_Hudson_O
701-79)A
Before he set sail forConstantinople, Lord Charlemont would have had the benefit of Wood's earlier travel exper ience inGreece, Egypt, and theAegean islands.There was only one publication available in English on travel in Asia Minor, namely E. Chishull's Travels in Turkey and back to England (1747), published posthumously by Chishull's son. These travels had been made in 1699, and about half the book relates to Asia Minor. The only useful book on Greek travel also dated from the seven teenth century, G. Wheler's A Journey intoGreece (1682), which provided the first illustratedaccount of Athens, and for sites outside Athens furnished information as to the extant archaeo logical remains.According to the cata logue made in 1865, Lord Charle mont's librarycontained two copies of Wheler, his own and Chishull's annot ated copy.When Chishull's book was published, Charlemont was in Rome, and it may have provided
ed; Stuart
and Revett
starting-point for survey ThomasHudson (1701-79), Nicholas Revett (1720-1804). CourtesyRoyal Instituteof BritishArchitects. -34
an additional
stimulus to thoughts of travel.Wheler's book contained the only published illu strationsof the design of the Parthenon, but in naive engravingswith numerous errors.Wheler had visited Greece in 1675, before the Venetian siege of the Acropolis, underMorosini, which led to the explosion which blew out the sides of the Parthenon in September 1687. Following that siege, no English travel ler recorded an account of Greece for the next fifty years.Wheler's Journey intoGreece thus remained the standard English book on modern Greece for many years, though itwas never reprint and
used
it as
a
their preliminary
the planning
of
their pro
gramme of systematic investigation of ancient Athens which commenced in 1751. Few travellersconsidered it necessary
IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
.
r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
=
RDatnEaFrnofteateo,Atute,15
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~r M= i R. Dalton,
or profitable to tour the mainland; many apparently considered a tour of the islandsenough to say they had seen Greece. Athens was little visited, and the interior of Greece hardly at all. Therefore, Charlemont's visit toAthens and his travels inland,north to Thebes and Euboa, and west to Corinth, were exceptional for the time and not with out danger.Greece was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Travel passes had to be granted by the Sultan in Constant inople. Intending visitors to Greece perforce had to travel via Constant inople to obtain their firmans, internal passportswith any special instructions to localTurkish governors.That iswhy, on leavingMalta, Lord Charlemont's partyset saildirectly forConstantinople, where he spent themonth of July 1749, obtaining his firmnansand observing Turkish society and its institutions. Charlemont seems to have been parti cularly impressed by the efficiency of the Turkish police; his Essay discusses
East
Front
of
the Parthenon,
Antiquities,
several aspectsof public and private life, including customs and law relating to marriage and divorce. Richard Dalton made a number of drawings in Const antinople, no doubt on Charlemont's instructions, and some of these match up with topics he laterdiscussed in his Turkish Essay, e.g. theWhirling Derv ishes. Two engravings of theWhirling Dervishes were published in Dalton's Antiquities and Views in Greece and Egyptwith Manners and Customs of the InhabitantsfromDrawingsmade on the Spot, A.D. 1749 (1791), along with many other views, including a re-issue of those of the Athenian buildings in Dalton's Antiquities (1752). From Constantinople, Lord Charle mont proceeded to Egypt, stopping en routeat theGreek islandsof Lesbos (at Mytilene), Chios (which he found en chanting), Mykonos, Delos, Naxos, Tinos, Syros and Paros.Thereafter they made for Alexandria. There is no in formation on Charlemont's activities in -35
1752.
Egypt, but from Dalton's published drawings
there
is evidence
of a visit
to
the Pyramids,and of interest in caparis oned camel processions and elaborately costumed riders. It seems that Charle mont's stay in Egypt may have been short, for he records that his firmans were not respected, and that the country was
in a state of anarchy. He
leftAlexandria inOctober 1749, bound for Cyprus, but adversewinds prevent ed a landing
there
so he headed
for
Rhodes instead. From Rhodes Lord Charlemont made his visit to Bodrum which led to his identification of the site of Halicarnassus and the discovery, in Bodrum Castle, of the relief sculpt ures from theMausoleum which were rediscovered a century later and are now in the British Museum, as are Dalton's drawings of them. While waiting
for
a fair wind
for Greece,
Charlemont's ship tacked to and fro off Rhodes,
and he made
a landing on
the
Asia Minor coast opposite Rhodes, at the site of the ancient Cnidos. There he
IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
1752. Frieze(Parthenon), R.Dalton,Section SectionofofPanathenaic Panathenaic 1752. (Parthenon), Frieze
R. Dalton,
explored the ruined remains, including the theatreand the templeofAphrodite. He also visited the islandof Cos. Eventually the party sailed to Piraeus, forAthens, and it was from there that Charlemont made his excursions inland to Corinth, Thebes and Euboa, travell ing with armed guards. In Athens interest focussed on the Acropolis and its temples and other surviving build ings below the Acropolis, notably the Theseion (the well-preserved Doric temple in the Agora), the octagonal Tower of theWinds, and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.Dalton's draw ings of these reveal his weaknesses; apart
from' a general
lack of
artistic
etched for his book (1752), are among his better efforts. The low-relief sculp ture, seen frontally, and with shades and shadows added, was perhaps a category of problem more congenial to the painter-engraver than complex score, and that he was the first to do so, three-dimensional forms such as the thatDalton is important.Though there Erechtheion. Charlemont and his companions took had been a Scottish artist, William Aikman, who travelled inGreek lands measurements of the Parthenon, evid in 1710-11, Dalton is the first artist ently limited to dimensions in the accurately to depict Greek antiquities horizontal plane, as only a scale plan of and the Parthenon in particular.On the the temple was published by Dalton. Acropolis Dalton made studies of the The Rev. EdwardMurphy was in charge Parthenon and the Erechtheion, and of measuring operations and equipment, drawingsof sections of the Panathenaic and Charlemont relates in his Greek frieze. The drawings of the frieze, as Essay how his partywas at first denied
force, his grasp of perspective is poor, and his eye for proportion is also faulty, such that he modifies the design of the Parthenon fronts in his drawings. Nevertheless, he conveys a great deal of informationaccurately,and it is on that
_
W9* t _
Ir,t,,~~~~~~~~~~I
-Iw
R. Dalton,
North
Side
of
-36
the Parthenon,
1752.
IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
Parthenon, and anticipated Stuart and Revett. Athens was the culmination of Lord Charlemont's tour. From Piraeus his ship sailed for Malta, where the party
access to the Acropolis on account of Murphy's impressive arrayof surveying instruments,which aroused the Turks' suspicions that they might be military engineers whose real objective was making a plan of the fortifications. In the end
all was well
and
was
admitted, with their apparatus restrict ed to a ten-foot rod and a foot-rule. In his Greek Essay,Lord Charlemont wrote: "In all the buildings remainingat Athens there is nothing more striking than the amazing exactness and conti guity of the joints, which are so wonderfully wrought that the edge of a knife can in no place be passed through the stones.... Those architects who had been so amazingly exact in their joints,were not equally so with regard to the intercolumniations, since upon the most accurate measurement we found the columns by no means equi distant."7 This indicates the degree of accuracypursued by Charlemont in his Parthenon survey; the plan prepared by Dalton correctly shows the reduced intercolumniationsof the angle columns of the external colonnade, whereby they
departed
for
forty
days
as
for the Near East.
The three journeys which were planned in Rome in the winter of 1748-49 produced eight books, if we count the three volumes of Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762, 1787, 1795), two versions of Dalton's Antiquities .. . (1752, 1791), and Robert Wood's Ruins of Palmyra (1753), Ruins of Balbec
(1757),
and An Essay on the
Original Genius of Homer (1769). Among the great travellers of the eighteenth century,Wood, alone, put his travels to literary-criticaluse, and in his Essay drew on his first-hand exper ience of the presumed Homeric locat
are closer together than the rest. Had and his party had the use Charlemont of all their measuring apparatus and
access to ladders, theymight well have attempted a complete survey of the
quarantined
plague was endemic in the Near East. Charlemont returned to Italy early in 1750 to spend the next five years there, mainly in Rome. In 1750 Stuart and Revett were in Venice, still seeking financial support for their Athens project, while Wood and Dawkins had
they were
ions; in its German
version
it made
an
important contribution to trends of R. Dalton, Detail of Caryatid, Erechtheion, 1752.
R. Dalton, Erechtheion from South East, 1752. -37
thought
in Germany
at the time.
The Dilettanti Society publication,
IRISHARTS REVIEW
LORD CHARLEMONT'S TRAVELS IN GREECE
..R Dalton,
The
T.
R. Dalton,
The
Theseion
lonian Antiquities, I (1769), was also influential in Germany, and Lord Charlemont
had a hand
in this as the
chairmanof the committee responsible for sending out the first Ionianmission of the Society, whose researches inAsia Minor 1764-66 are presented in the volume. The lonianmission comprised William Chandler, antiquarian and classical scholar, Nicholas Revett, the architect, andWilliam Pars, a painter. In addition to writing the text of lonian Antiquities, Chandler published on his own account Travels in Asia Minor (1775) and Travels in Greece (1776). Together, these two books constitute the most important descriptions of Greece in the eighteenth century. In Chandler's Travels the surviving physi cal beauty of Greece is clearly convey ed, and in his description he creates unusually lucid images of the Greek landscape which scholars and poets found particularly rewarding.Goethe read Chandler, and acknowledged his debt toWood. With Chandler, Stuart, Revett, and the Dilettanti publications, the studyof Greece and hermonuments had become a discipline;Chandler ends
S W 1
(Hephaisteion),
Athens
from
South-West,
the line of pioneers and established the topographyof Greece on a proper basis. While Charlemont chaired the commit tee which organized the first Ionian mission of the Society of Dilettanti, it was Wood who was responsible for theirdetailed instructions.Nevertheless, Charlemont was at the centre of things, as he had been
in Rome.
Lord Charlemont continued to keep up with the latest travel publications after he returned to live permanently in Irelandaround 1765, and he incorpor ated commentarieson new books in his rewritten essays,which he continued to work on, almost until his death in 1799, just as a new phase of Greek
travel and
discovery was commencing.After 1800 all restrictions on British travellers in Greece were removed by theTurks, in a period of greatly improved relations following LordNelson's victories at the Nile. Taste and antiquarian interesthad already shifted from Rome to Greece, and the dilettanti travellerswere soon followed by the professionals, artists, architectsand archaeologists. H. C. S. Ferguson -38
1752.
NOTES at Marino", 1. See D. N. Johnson, "The Casino Irish Arts Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Autumn), 1984, pp. 18-23. 2.W. B. Stanford, E. J. Finopoulos (eds.), The inGreece and Travels of Lord Charlemont Turkey 1749, 1984. 3. P. A. Guys, Voyage litt?raire de la Gr?ce ou ..., Lettres sur les Grecs anciens et modernes had the English 1771. Lord Charlemont edition, A Sentimental Journey through Greece, 1772. as 4. Dalton's drawings published R. Dalton, Antiquities of Greece 1752. R. Sayer, Ruins of Athens inGreece, Valuable Antiquities pirated English version of J. D. Ruines des plus beaux monuments
in engravings and Egypt, and Other 1759, was a Leroy, Les de la Gr?ce,
1758. 5. For some other early travellers in the Levant see B. de Breffny, "Liotard's Irish Patrons", Irish Arts Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer), was 1987, pp.31-38. (J-E. Liotard (1702-93) Lord the Swiss artist who accompanied and William Sandwich (a close Ponsonby from Co. relative of Lord Charlemont's, on their eastern Mediterranean Kilkenny) travelsl 738-39.) for 6. I am indebted to Mrs. Cynthia O'Connor information on Borra. 7. Stanford & Finopoulos, op. cit., pp. 130-132.
