Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the “Northern Gothic Art Tour” – Ephemera and Alterity

Abstract

During the early nineteenth century, the voyage to the past was to become a central destination for the discerning art tourist as for artists and writers. Yet, such voyages were as much ephemeral as actual, virtual creations of burgeoning antiquities tours in print and image. This chapter explores the pivotal, yet neglected significance of Northern European Gothic ‘tours’ flourishing between Britain and the Low Countries from the 1830s–1860s. It sheds new light on trailblazing accounts by Romantic tourists, Maria Graham (Lady) Callcott, Johann David Passavant, and the Gothic revivalist, W.H. James Weale, examining their fascination with Northern medieval Gothic architectures, art, and spaces of unseen heritage, constructed via ephemeral tour experiences as complex palimpsests of memory, modernity, and its other.