Not Your Average Pub Crawl: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century

Susan Buhr '04

Susan Buhr, a Classics major, completed a semester-long independent study project in Art History on The Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was, in short, a visit to Europe undertaken by the wealthy young men of eighteenth century England intended as the capstone to their Classical education. The study was advised by Professor Susan Wegner, and parts involved the aid of Jennifer Edwards, Curator of Visual Resources.

Sir John SoaneThe Independent Study was designed as a series of three projects dividing the semester. The first part was devoted to the preparation of a lecture, entitled "Not Your Average Pub Crawl: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century." The lecture focused on a visual representation, through slides, of the route travelers took through Italy and important sites seen by tourists, with particular attention paid to the parallels between The Grand Tour and modern concepts of "study-abroad" and tourism. The second project was more conventional, a research paper on the topic of Classical education at the university level in eighteenth century England. Finally, the last part of the semester was spent assembling a detailed annotated bibiliography on the collection and museum of Sir John Soane, a Neoclassical architect of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London.

Susan intends to expand the research paper portion of this project into an honors project in Classics, with emphasis on the life and work of Richard Bentley during his tenureship as Master of Trinity College at Cambridge, and his influence on the importance of Classical scholarship