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William Gell and Thomas Graham Jackson: Recording the Topography of Dalmatia at the Beginning and Towards the End of the 19th Century

In the Introduction to his three-volume book on Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria with Cettigne in Montenegro and the island of Grado, published in Oxford in 1887, Sir Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924) makes reference to the English travellers who “were the first to make these countries and monuments of art which they contain known to western Europeans”. Although he drew up a fairly comprehensive list of his fellow-countrymen who had extended the standard Grand Tour itinerary to the eastern Adriatic coast, there was a yet another significant visitor – the archaeologist and illustrator Sir William Gell (1777–1836). A keen traveller across Mediterranean Europe, Gell left nearly eight hundred drawings of various cities and landscapes, now in the British Museum, which include the topographical records of Zadar, Hvar, Dubrovnik, Pelješac, Pag, and Dugi otok, dated to May 1801. In this paper, we will discuss and compare the drawings of Dalmatian cities made by Sir William Gell and Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, focusing specifically on the visualisation of the cities’ topographical features, and the level of detail provided. Our aim is to explore how these small urban centres were perceived and recorded early into the 19th century, when Dalmatia was a brief stopping-point for travellers on their way to the South-Eastern Mediterranean (or even a never- actually-visited territory experienced from the deck of a ship), and some eighty years afterwards, when the region was already a well-known tourist destination. An examination of Gell’s and Jackson’s drawings of the same place – the city of Hvar – will allow us to get a better grasp of the artists’ respective approaches to topographical representation, and will also provide an important insight into the actual changes the city’s fabric had experienced as the 19th century wore on (such as the transformations of the block with the Civic Loggia and the Arsenal with the theatre). This study will be further complemented by selected data from the online Chrono- geographical database of Grand Tourism in Dalmatia, which will help us place the work of both Gell and Jackson in their wider contexts.

T. G. Jackson, William Gell, Dalmatia, topography, 19th century

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