Inside Museums episode 3 invites viewers to embark on a journey that transcends physical borders, exploring the world through the lens of the Ulster Museum in Belfast. At a time when global travel became restricted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the concept of the “grand tour” took on a different meaning, shifting from physical movement to visual exploration. Presented by social historian Emma Dabiri, the programme highlights how gallery walls have served as windows to faraway lands for centuries, offering perspectives that are sometimes captured with forensic accuracy and other times tamed or misrepresented by the artist’s brush.
The significance of this museum documentary lies in its timely examination of the human impulse to explore. While the physical world became smaller, confined to rooms and local parks, the artistic world remained boundless. The Ulster Museum itself, described as an architectural blend of classical columns and brutalist chunks set in verdant botanical gardens, houses treasures that map the history of human curiosity. Inside, visitors are greeted by wicker dragons and five floors of art, history, and science, including ancient temple bells from China that speak of a distant time and place.
This particular exploration focuses on an exhibition titled “Changing Views,” which examines the role of the artist as a traveller. It is an ironic subject for a period defined by travel restrictions, yet it offers a profound way to indulge wanderlust. By engaging with these works, audiences can trace the evolution of travel from the exclusive purview of the wealthy aristocracy to the complex, carbon-heavy tourism of the modern era. The narrative woven through the episode suggests that there is more to travel than simple tourism; it is an attempt to see what others saw and to broaden the horizons of the mind.
Art history provides the roadmap for this journey, beginning with the origins of the word “tourist” itself in the 18th century. The narrative moves through the eras of colonial expansion, where the world was treated as a possession to be documented, to the romanticized landscapes of the 19th century, and finally to contemporary environmental concerns. Each artwork selected for this tour reveals not just a location, but a specific way of seeing, heavily influenced by the gender, class, and nationality of the artist.
The progression of the exhibition mirrors the changing motivations for travel, from the acquisition of cultural capital to the desperate necessity of emigration. As the presenter navigates the collection, the viewer is asked to consider the ethics of the gaze—whether it is the voyeuristic depiction of foreign women or the imposition of British interior design on North African spaces. The journey concludes with a stark reminder of the environmental cost of exploration, suggesting that the future of travel may once again rely on the power of the image rather than the jet engine.
Navigating the globe through these painted canvases and intricate etchings allows for a form of travel that is safe from invisible foes and responsible in the face of climate change. It is a testament to the enduring power of inside museums to keep the human mind untethered, even when the body is grounded.
Inside Museums episode 3
The Grand Tour and the Architecture of Rome in Inside Museums Episode 3
The concept of tourism as a leisure activity has its roots in the “Grand Tour” of the 1700s, a rite of passage primarily for wealthy aristocratic men. This extended journey, which could last from a few months to several years, took these early tourists through France, Switzerland, Greece, and, inevitably, Italy. The objective was to broaden the mind, but also to signal one’s status upon return. Travelers commissioned artists to “take the view,” effectively bringing Italy back home with them. These souvenirs were not merely decorative; they were proof of travel and cultural sophistication.
Among the most celebrated of these chroniclers was Giovanni Piranesi, an Italian draughtsman, printmaker, and architect renowned for his ability to accurately depict buildings. The Ulster Museum holds over 50 of his works, which serve as a centerpiece for understanding 18th-century travel. Piranesi was a genius of etching, working with acid and metal to manipulate scale and light in a way that brought the stone structures of Rome to life. His works, such as those depicting the Piazza Navona, capture the sensory experience of the city—the noise, the smell, and the palpable energy of the square.
Piranesi’s attention to detail extended beyond the architecture to the social fabric of the city. In the Piazza di Spagna, he rendered the stylish gentlemen of the time wearing tricorns, or cocked hats, designed to show off their wigs. He utilized his mastery of lines to show how the sun casts long shadows on the Spanish Steps, demonstrating his prowess as a master draughtsman. Yet, his work was not merely a celebration of the elite. Piranesi was equally interested in the decay and the struggle inherent in the city.
His etchings capture the poverty, lameness, and drunkenness that existed alongside the grandeur, offering a full spectrum of human experience. The ruins of Rome, in Piranesi’s hands, became metaphors for the transience and imperfection of human existence. These images serve as important objects of social history, documenting real lives from beggars to barons. They remind the viewer that the “Grand Tour” was a spectator sport where the wealthy observed the lives of the locals, capturing the highs and lows of a society in flux.
Romanticism, Sketchbooks, and the Call of the Wild
As the 19th century progressed and railways expanded, travel became accessible to a wider demographic of artists, leading to a shift in how the world was depicted. This era saw the rise of the Picturesque and Romanticism, movements that prioritized wild, untamed nature over the orderly classical views of the previous century. The emphasis shifted to emotion and the beauty found in irregularity. Artists like Jean-Baptiste Louis Hubert exemplified this transition, creating landscapes that felt real, warm, and engaging.
Hubert’s work often placed human figures within nature, dwarfed by their surroundings. His urban landscapes, occasionally resembling the backdrop of a movie set or a mid-century animation, utilized irregularity of form, color, and lighting to create a “rustic chewiness.” In one notable painting, a pool of sunlight shines on a distant bank like a spotlight from the heavens, evoking a sense of tranquil nostalgia. This yearning for a pre-industrial past became a powerful force in art history as the industrial revolution began to transform the physical world.
This new way of seeing is intimately revealed in the sketchbooks of John Ruskin. A page torn from his book, preserved in the museum, shows a snow-capped peak in the Alps. For Ruskin, the act of observing and rendering what was felt was paramount. His sketch, confident in pencil, uses shadow to create canyons and gorges, giving the mountain massive heft. A wash of umber suggests the warmth of the morning sun, while white pigment is used to dust the top with snow, described as crisp as icing sugar.
These unfinished sketches offer a private glimpse into Ruskin’s mind—sketching, planning, and working through ideas. He believed that travel was essential for the artist, famously advising students to ignore the “Old Masters” and instead go directly to nature to feel its power. Scribbled notes on the side of his drawings reveal his thought process, discussing “perpetual covering with invisible lines.” This intimacy pulls the viewer closer to his philosophy: that art is power and emotion, derived from a direct confrontation with the natural world.
Colonial Perspectives and the Englishman’s Back Garden
The enthusiasm for travel promoted by figures like Ruskin was underpinned by the geopolitical reality of the British Empire. For a white Englishman in the 19th century, the world was essentially a vast back garden. He could traverse distant lands with a sense of ownership because, in many cases, his nation had taken them by force. This dynamic is clearly visible in the works of artists who travelled to British colonies, such as Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka).
Andrew Nicholl, a Belfast artist, visited Ceylon in the 1840s at the invitation of the Colonial Secretary. At the time, the region had just emerged from forty years of bloody conflict, with the British establishing firm control. However, Nicholl’s paintings betray none of this violence. Instead, he presents a land of exotic light and charming boats. He revels in colors he would never use in Northern Ireland, painting surf with flecks of white and palm trees that fan out against the sky. For a man of humble origins, the son of a shoemaker, this travel was an assault on the senses and a privilege of the colonial structure.
A similar dynamic appears in the work of Sir John Lavery, a celebrated portrait artist who moved in the upper echelons of society. Lavery’s travels took him to Tangier, Morocco, where he, like his contemporary Matisse, was captivated by the clarity of the light. His painting of the city bathed in moonlight, rendered in cool tones of grey, white, and lilac, depicts mysterious hooded figures and the glow of cooking fires. It is a romanticized, almost theatrical view of North Africa.
However, another of Lavery’s works, The Greyhound, reveals the insularity of the colonial experience. The painting depicts the interior of the British Legation in Tangier, featuring the British Minister Sir Reginald Lister. The room is indistinguishable from a London drawing room or a gentleman’s club, complete with gilt mirrors and chandeliers. The only hint of the foreign location is the jacaranda flowers outside the window. This image underscores how the colonies often served merely as backdrops for Englishmen to perform their self-appointed civilizing missions, imposing their own domestic aesthetic on foreign lands while ignoring the local culture entirely.
The Sexualized Gaze and the Female Artist
As the 20th century arrived, artists began to make the foreign inhabitants of these lands the central focus of their work, rather than just the landscape or the colonial occupiers. This shift, however, introduced new complexities regarding representation and the “other.” A striking example is found in the work of William Walcot, whose print A Greek Lady demonstrates immense technical skill in etching and drypoint.
Walcot creates a figure with clean lines and textured fabrics, the folds of her dress suggesting the body beneath. The subject looks coyly aside with a hint of a smile. While artistically accomplished, the image teeters on the edge of Orientalism—the sexualizing and exoticizing of an Eastern woman. Walcot, known for dressing in togas while in Greece to achieve “cultural immersion,” presents a view that is arguably voyeuristic, projecting a Western fantasy onto the foreign subject.
A contrasting perspective is offered by the American painter Doris Rosenthal, who travelled extensively in Mexico. Her lithograph Chiquillos (Kids) depicts indigenous children with a waxy crayon on limestone. The soft, charcoal-like tones create a stylized and romantic image that retains an earthy honesty. Crucially, the children in Rosenthal’s work, as well as the subjects in her piece Plum Girls, look directly at the viewer.
This direct gaze challenges the passive observation found in earlier works. The expressions of the girls are ambiguous—reading as fear, defiance, or boredom. This raises the question of whether the dynamic changed because the artist was a woman. While Rosenthal’s work feels more intimate and less predatory, the documentary questions whether all such depictions walk a fine line between genuine representation and voyeurism. It highlights the troublesome nature of documenting people in countries distant from one’s own, a central theme in this inside museums exploration.
Emigration and the Sadness of Departure
Returning closer to home, the narrative shifts from the excitement of tourism to the stark reality of emigration. Travel was not always a leisure activity; for many, it was a one-way journey necessitated by survival. This is poignantly captured in the work of Irish artist Sean Keating, specifically his painting Slan Leat a Athair (Goodbye, Father), set on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway.
The painting depicts a priest leaving Inisheer, the smallest of the islands, to return to the mainland. Traditionally, a priest would be the central, facing figure in such a composition. Keating, however, paints him from the back. This artistic choice suggests a deference to the stoical toughness of the islanders and the wild beauty of the landscape. The scene is one of quiet solemnity, heightened by the heavy Atlantic sky and crashing waves.
The boatman in the painting struggles to keep the vessel steady, a physical manifestation of the hardness of life in this remote place. The horizon, which represents the priest’s destination, is depicted as flat and unknowable, serving as a metaphor for death. This is a departure that feels final. The muscular application of paint chimes with the granite hardness of the men, weathered by the elements.
Crucially, the presenter notes the absence of women in this scene. It raises questions about who gets to travel, who gets to stay, and who is deemed worthy of documentation in these moments of profound social change. The painting stands as a sombre counterpoint to the sunny, exoticized views of foreign lands, grounding the theme of travel in the painful history of Irish emigration.
Female Pioneers and the Scientific Value of Art
While men dominated the art academies and the history books, female artists were also travelling and documenting the world, often against significant odds. In the 18th century, Susanna Drury spent three months walking the cliff path to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to produce a pair of gouache paintings on vellum. At a time when women could not even buy paint without a man’s signature, Drury’s dedication was an act of defiance.
Painting on animal skin requires a tiny brush and immense precision, a task made nearly impossible by the fierce winds of the North Atlantic. Yet, Drury succeeded in capturing the 40,000 basalt columns with remarkable accuracy. Her paintings show the sunlight hitting the hexagonal stones, picking out the individual shapes of the “biscuit” towers. She includes details of human life: pleasure-seekers picnicking, men fishing, and workers seemingly taking stones for construction.
Drury signed her name on a basalt block in the painting—minuscule, yet bold. The impact of these works extended far beyond the artistic. In 1771, French geologist Nicolas Desmarest used engravings of Drury’s paintings to support the theory that the Causeway was of volcanic origin rather than man-made. This spirited amateur not only expanded scientific understanding but also helped turn the Causeway into the major travel destination it is today. Her work exemplifies how Inside Museums episode 3 seeks to uncover the hidden contributions of marginalized figures in art history.
Environmental Activism and the End of Travel
The journey through the Ulster Museum concludes with a contemporary work that flips the narrative completely. Rather than encouraging travel, it implores the viewer to stop. Elaine Shemilt, a contemporary artist and environmental activist, presents a print titled South Georgia. The image is a simple, embossed outline of the island of South Georgia on the edge of the Antarctic.
This location is loaded with historical significance. Once a base for seven whaling stations, it was the site of a “grisly orgy of blood and blubber,” synonymous with the industrial destruction of the natural world. Today, however, South Georgia serves as a bellwether for environmentalists and a barometer for the effects of climate change. Shemilt’s work invites the viewer to engage with a terrifying proposition: that the history of exploration and exploitation has created a world where we must now travel less to save what remains.
The artwork demonstrates the profound changes the world has undergone. The very impulse that drove the Grand Tour and the colonial expeditions—the desire to see and consume the world—now threatens its existence. Even after the respite provided by global lockdowns, where skies were empty of planes, the message remains that complacency is dangerous.
The episode suggests a circularity to this history. Faced with the invisible foe of a virus or the existential threat of global warming, the safest and most responsible way to travel may once again be through pictures. Whether online or in a gallery, art allows the mind to wander without the carbon footprint. Inside Museums episode 3 ultimately posits that while passports may remain unused, the human imagination, fueled by the permanent reminders of past journeys, will never be tethered.
FAQ Inside Museums episode 3
Q: What is the central theme of Inside Museums episode 3?
A: This episode explores how the Ulster Museum’s art collection enables virtual travel through different eras and perspectives. Presented by Emma Dabiri during the Covid-19 pandemic, it examines how gallery walls have historically served as windows to distant lands when physical movement was restricted. The programme traces travel’s evolution from the 18th-century Grand Tour through colonial expansion to contemporary environmental concerns, revealing how each artwork reflects the gender, class, and nationality of its creator while questioning the ethics of representation.
Q: Who was Giovanni Piranesi and why are his works significant?
A: Giovanni Piranesi was an Italian draughtsman, printmaker, and architect celebrated for his extraordinary etchings of Rome. The Ulster Museum houses over 50 of his works, which served as sophisticated souvenirs for wealthy Grand Tour travellers in the 1700s. His mastery of etching techniques allowed him to manipulate scale and light, bringing stone structures to vivid life. Furthermore, Piranesi captured both grandeur and decay, documenting everything from stylish gentlemen in tricorns at Piazza di Spagna to the poverty and struggle existing alongside Roman magnificence.
Q: How did the Romantic movement change artistic depictions of travel?
A: As railways expanded in the 19th century, Romanticism shifted artistic focus from orderly classical views to wild, untamed nature. Artists like Jean-Baptiste Louis Hubert prioritized emotion and beauty found in irregularity, creating landscapes that felt warm and engaging. John Ruskin’s Alpine sketches exemplified this movement, advising students to ignore Old Masters and directly confront nature’s power. This yearning for pre-industrial authenticity became increasingly powerful as the industrial revolution transformed the physical world, representing a profound departure from earlier documentary approaches.
Q: What colonial perspectives are revealed through the artworks discussed?
A: The episode examines how British Empire dynamics influenced artistic representation, particularly through Andrew Nicholl’s 1840s Ceylon paintings and Sir John Lavery’s Moroccan works. Nicholl’s exotic, colorful depictions omitted the region’s violent forty-year conflict that had just concluded. Similarly, Lavery’s painting The Greyhound shows the British Legation in Tangier decorated identically to a London drawing room, with only jacaranda flowers hinting at the foreign location. These works demonstrate how colonies served as backdrops for colonial self-performance rather than genuine cultural engagement.
Q: How does the episode address gender differences in artistic representation?
A: The documentary contrasts William Walcot’s potentially voyeuristic depiction of a Greek woman with Doris Rosenthal’s Mexican subjects who directly confront the viewer. Walcot’s work demonstrates Orientalist tendencies, sexualizing and exoticizing Eastern women, while Rosenthal’s lithographs show indigenous children with ambiguous expressions suggesting fear, defiance, or boredom. This direct gaze challenges passive observation, raising questions about whether female artists approached foreign subjects with less predatory perspectives. However, the programme acknowledges that all such depictions navigate a delicate line between genuine representation and voyeurism.
Q: What does Sean Keating’s painting reveal about Irish emigration?
A: Keating’s Slan Leat a Athair depicts a priest departing Inisheer in the Aran Islands, painted unusually from behind rather than facing forward. This compositional choice demonstrates deference to the islanders’ stoical toughness and the landscape’s wild beauty. The heavy Atlantic sky, crashing waves, and struggling boatman physically manifest the hardness of remote island life. Additionally, the flat, unknowable horizon serves as a death metaphor, emphasizing emigration’s finality. The absence of women raises pointed questions about who travels, who remains, and whose stories merit documentation.
Q: What challenges did Susanna Drury overcome to paint the Giant’s Causeway?
A: In the 18th century, Drury spent three months walking cliff paths to create remarkably precise gouache paintings on vellum, despite women being unable to purchase art supplies without male authorization. Painting on animal skin demanded tiny brushes and immense precision while enduring fierce North Atlantic winds. Her dedication proved scientifically valuable when French geologist Nicolas Desmarest used engravings of her work in 1771 to support theories about the Causeway’s volcanic origin. Consequently, this spirited amateur expanded scientific understanding and helped establish the site as a major tourist destination.
Q: How does the exhibition structure reflect travel’s historical evolution?
A: The Changing Views exhibition progresses chronologically from 18th-century Grand Tours through colonial expansion to contemporary environmental activism. Initially, travel served as cultural capital acquisition for wealthy aristocrats commissioning Italian views as status symbols. Subsequently, the industrial revolution and railway expansion democratized artistic travel while colonial dominance enabled exploitative documentation of foreign lands. The narrative concludes with urgent environmental concerns, suggesting that centuries of exploration and exploitation now necessitate reduced physical travel. This progression mirrors humanity’s shifting relationship with movement, consumption, and planetary responsibility.
Q: What environmental message does Elaine Shemilt’s artwork convey?
A: Shemilt’s South Georgia print presents a simple embossed outline of the Antarctic island, historically significant as a whaling station site representing industrial destruction. Today, the location serves as an environmental bellwether and climate change barometer, creating a terrifying proposition about exploration’s consequences. The artwork implores viewers to stop travelling rather than encouraging it, acknowledging that the consumptive impulse driving Grand Tours and colonial expeditions now threatens planetary existence. Even after pandemic-induced travel reductions temporarily cleared skies, the piece warns against complacency regarding our carbon-heavy tourism habits.
Q: Why does the episode suggest returning to visual travel experiences?
A: The documentary proposes a circular return to image-based exploration as both pandemic safety measure and climate responsibility strategy. Just as 18th-century aristocrats brought Italy home through commissioned paintings, contemporary audiences can satisfy wanderlust through gallery visits or online viewing without carbon footprints. This approach acknowledges that physical world restrictions—whether from invisible viral threats or environmental degradation—make visual exploration simultaneously safer and more sustainable. Ultimately, the episode champions museums’ enduring power to keep human minds untethered even when bodies remain grounded, proving imagination needs no passport.
