Gallery

Although enduring interest in Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire (1810) has focused almost exclusively on Wordsworth’s anonymous letterpress, the volume’s fundamental raison d’être was the landscape art of the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson. As recounted in our introduction to Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, Wilkinson was an avid amateur artist with a particular passion for his native Lake District. In publishing Select Views, he fulfilled a fifteen-year dream of putting his sketches into wider circulation.

This exhibition examines how museum spaces were conceptualized and visually represented in two-dimensional media forms, drawing examples principally from metropolitan London. Many of the museums of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century no longer exist. However, prints and paintings, often reproduced in gallery guides, periodicals, and ephemera, are valuable sources of information about the objects that they contained: from oddities and marvels to natural history specimens and revered artworks. Such images also document the arrangement of objects and the display strategies employed by collectors and museums, as well as the visual idioms—and aesthetic categories—they used to capture and ‘frame’ their interiors.

“Start hence with us, and trace, with raptur’d eye, / The wild meanderings of the beauteous WYE; / Thy ten days leisure ten days joy shall prove, / And rock and stream breathe amity and love” (see Robert Bloomfield's poem, The Banks of Wye