Lord Fitzwilliam’s Grand Tour

E.A. Smith describes how, immediately after the Seven Years’ War, the young Earl Fitzwilliam became a grand tourist of Europe in the eighteenth-century style.

E.A. Smith | Published in History Today Volume 17 Issue 5 May 1967

During the greater part of the eighteenth century, the ‘Grand Tour’ was regarded as an essential stage in the education of the young English aristocrat. After the end of the wars against Louis XIV, Western Europe was relatively stable and peaceful, while the example of the grand monarque had done much to create a cosmopolitan society and culture. Travelling, too, was now more practicable, and the extension of facilities for the tourist had lessened some of the rigours of the seventeenth century.

At home in England, the development of criteria of ‘taste’, and the rise in aristocratic incomes that made possible its indulgence, created a demand for the cultivation of sensibility by direct contact with the art treasures and classical remains of the Latin south.

The building, rebuilding and furbishing of the splendid mansions and country houses, with which the aristocracy and gentry decorated and civilized the English countryside, owed much to the example and importation of works of classical antiquity, and of pictures, sculpture, and furniture from the finest French and Italian artists and craftsmen of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods.