In Search of Classical Greece: Travel Drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi at The British Museum

This exhibition looks at Greece in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Classical scholar Edward Dodwell and Italian artist Simone Pomardi toured mainland Greece in the years 1805-6. It was a time when French military occupation prevented Grand Tourists from visiting Italy and, like Dodwell and Pomardi, many travelers chose to explore Greece and its Helanistic past which was beyond the established route of the Grand Tour. This exhibition will examine the journey that Dodwell and Pomardi embarked on in Greece in the age of Enlightenment, observing the motivation and circumstance of such travel as well as its cultural consequences. The exhibition will feature a selection of seventy highly finished watercolors, drawings in sepia and pen-and-ink sketches. The subjects of the images within the exhibition range from beautiful rural landscapes, to the striking antiquities of Greece. Amongst the most impressive images are five vast panoramas, measuring up to four metres in length.