‘SERIA LUDO’ (looking at serious subjects in a playful manner) is something of which I greatly approve. It was a policy adopted by the Society of Dilettanti in the 18th century, young aristocrats on the Grand Tour in search of the Antique in Italy. Thomas Patch parodied them in his ‘A Gathering of Dilettanti around the Medici Venus’ which I was delighted to discover on long-term loan to Basildon Park as part of the collection of Sir Brindsley Ford, the great Grand Tour scholar whose papers are now at the @paulmelloncentr . The star piece is the wonderful Pompeo Batoni portrait of Humphry Morice resting like a poet in the landscape in the Vatican Gardens with his hounds (he was an animal lover who left £600 in his will for his horses and hounds). The pose is echoed in a portrait of Ford by Alec Cobbe (whom I incidentally visited a couple of weeks ago at Hatchlands park). There are also drawings by Tiepolo, paintings by Richard Wilson, and others such as Giovanni Batista Busiri, Serafino Cesaretti and Anton Rafael Mengs. It also includes a portrait of the Byres family by Franciszek Smuglewicz. In 1778 Philip Yorke wrote of how Byres varied his site-seeing according to the weather: “Antiquities and ruins when fine, statues and palaces when wet, and if it should be a clear say but unpleasantly windy we see pictures.” #grandtour #basildonpark #pompeobatoni #sirbrindsleyford #brindsleyford #thomaspatch (at Basildon Park - National Trust) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRwnhKRlANz/?utm_medium=tumblr
