The choice of subject in this piece, a crumbling medieval monastery situated on the border between Scotland and England, can be interpreted as a temporally and spatially liminal place; the presence of the ruins collapses not only the present and the past, but also the national identities of the English and the Scottish.
This image depicts the ruins of Hadleigh Castle, near Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. The two remaining towers of the castle stand in the left register of the picture place, a scrawny tree between them. In the lower left corner, a shepherd boy carrying a staff is walking up the incline toward the ruins. A dog follows close behind him, looking up at the sky.
During the Romantic era, tourism—and picturesque tourism, in particular—gained popularity across the Continent. While William Gilpin’s enormously popular British domestic tours were circulating in the 1780s and 1790s, an intense debate about the nature of the picturesque was being waged, partly in response to Gilpin’s “authoritative judgements” on the topic (see Stephen Copley's essay "Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque" in , ed. Michael Rosenthal, et. al, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997; 133).
A beehive sits atop a thick board, with wild-looking plants growing on either side. Grass grows around the hive's board. Seven bees hover around the top of the hive, with another at the hive's center. The board bears the word "industry"; below the grass, a banner with forked ends reads "honesty and integrity."
This image depicts a death's-head moth on a white background, with wings outstretched.
In its vivid but stark depiction of a death's head moth, this illustration indicates the influence of Rousseau's thought on children's education: rather than relying on associationism, Rousseau's ideal education resisted the collaboration of fact and fantasy as potentially harmful.
In this image, the fantastical and the scientific are combined to make the subject matter of the accompanying text more appealing to a young audience.
Richard Parkes Bonington's Seapiece is an example of Romantic-era depictions of the sea as an unpredictable force. The motion of the waves and the leaning of the smaller vessels help to create this effect. Various ships are visible in the distance, and one ship in full sail sits directly beyond the coastal waters.
