Study Room Open House: The Idea of Italy

A display of photographs, drawings, and watercolors will be on view in the YCBA Study Room, in conjunction with the 4 pm book discussion on “The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination.”
The book examines how the new medium of photography influenced the British experience, appreciation, and perception of Italy in the nineteenth century.
The associated display, drawn from the museum’s rich collection of more than five hundred works on paper depicting Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, brings together watercolors and drawings executed by artists on the Grand Tour alongside early nineteenth-century photographs of Italy. Together the works demonstrate the influence of photography on traditions of Grand Tour image making.