Turner and the Grand Tour - five online talks by Simon Rees

One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of the 18th and 19th centuries was the Grand Tour. Initially it was aristocrats and the sons of rich men (rarely the daughters) who made the laborious journey across France and Switzerland and down through the Italian states to Florence, Rome and Naples. On these tours they collected works of art, studied architecture, drawing, literature and music. Britain is rich in the collections amassed on these tours and rich, too, in the poetry, fiction, letters and travelogues that the Grand Tourists and their less-grand followers produced.

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of JMW Turner’s birth in 1775, this series centres on the life, works and travels of this greatest of British landscape artist through the prism of the Grand Tour; it will also look at his precursors, contemporaries and successors. The lectures will be illustrated with well-known and less-well-known works by Turner and his contemporaries, and with quotations from writers ranging from Smollett and Sterne to Byron and Shelley, Dickens and Browning.

They take place every Thursday from 20th March to 17th April 2025 at 4.30pm (London) and, including Q&A, will last just under an hour. They are available for viewing for eight weeks after the last episode is streamed (12th June 2025).