Malaga exhibition reveals lost souvenirs of 18th-century British aristocrats' European travels

It was called the Grand Tour, a trip for young British aristocrats to Europe to visit other royal courts, their many palaces and their art. They were eager to discover the world and they travelled with pockets full of money. For this reason, at each stop along the Grand Tour, artists, merchants, booksellers and musicians awaited them with pieces that would later decorate the enormous state rooms and libraries of many a British stately home.

“I am sending the painting on a very safe ship,” one of these travellers wrote in a letter to his father. He was right. Up to fourteen insurers and bankers had guaranteed the cargo on board the Westmorland with all the souvenirs that one such band of merry young men had acquired en route. Sadly, it never reached its destination. Two French warships captured the frigate at sea, a few miles from Malaga, and offloaded the dozens of bundles it had stored in its hold. It was 8 January 1779. Two and a half centuries later, some of these unique and valuable souvenirs of these men’s travels return to Malaga to bring to life this part of the history of the Westmorland.

The Unicaja foundation and the San Fernando royal academy of fine art of Madrid (where a large part of the goods bought by Charles III at the behest of his prime minister, the Count of Floridablanca, ended up) have brought together the marble pieces, watercolours, books and even the sheet music that the British frigate was carrying, all now back at the Unicaja foundation cultural centre in Malaga city where the Grand Tour came to a less grand end.

Perhaps above all the exhibition entitled The Westmorland in Malaga is here to remind us of a little-known historical event that speaks of a time of great political turmoil. Only months after the seizure of this cargo, Spain would also enter into war with Great Britain. Both countries had their own high society with exquisite taste and this can be seen in the exhibition. It does so through works that contextualise the event with press cuttings, notarised documents from the provincial archive of Malaga, even an oil painting with a view of Malaga port in the 18th century brought directly from the royal palace El Pardo in Madrid, with paintings and sculptures that put faces to the distinguished travellers on this Grand Tour and with pieces that reveal their individual artistic interests.

The exhibition, curated by the archaeologist, researcher and member of San Fernando, José María Luzón, can be visited until 12 January at the cultural centre in Plaza del Obispo. Here's an unusual recommendation for an exhibition of a historical event: keep your mobile phone handy. "Technology is a fundamental ally" in this wander through the treasures of the ship, as indicated by Rafael Valentín López, head of the plastic arts department at the Unicaja Foundation (the team that oversees and catalogues the foundation's art collection). Through QR codes, the exhibition allows visitors to circle a sculpture, turn the pages of a book or listen to the sheet music found on the Westmorland.

For years, the identity of the owners of the Westmorland shipment was a mystery. But a small detail, a very unusual acronym on one of the packages, revealed to researchers at the San Fernando academy that the letters on the wrappings were in fact the initials of their owners.

The main clue was in the letters 'H.R.H.D.G': His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester, the brother of King George III. So from there they went on to discover that, along with this member of the royal household, there travelled aristocrats such as Francis Basset (future Baron of Dunstanville), George Legge (Viscount of Lewisham and future Earl of Dartmouth) and John Henderson (son of the owner of Scotland's coal mines), among others. The portraits that Francis Basset and George Legge had painted of them in Pompeo Batoni's studio in Rome as souvenirs of their Grand Tour are on display in Malaga on loan from El Prado museum. Unfortuantely the Museo del Prado had kept them for decades under erroneous titles or names and even had marked them as "anonymous". In the background are elements of what they saw on their travels, such as Roman architecture in the case of Basset and a recently discovered bust of Faustina Minor in Legge's portrait.

It was one of the favourite souvenirs of King George III's brother, who owned most of the classical and Renaissance sculptures aboard the Westmorland. An elegant and beautiful Head of the Medici Venus stands out, together with two delicately-embracing couples, Bacchus and Ariadne then Eros and Psyche, from the atelier of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. Also in marble are a Roman funerary urn, which reflects the interest in archaeology of British high society at the time, and another very similar one from the 18th century, which ended up in Spain's National Archaeological Museum.

They functioned as travel postcards for the aristocracy, the only way to capture the places and monuments that had bedazzled them along the way. The watercolours by John Robert Cozens bought by the young Francis Basset are worth mentioning, not only because of the artist - the great watercolourist of the period - but also because of the fantastic state of preservation of these pieces. "When the specialists saw these, they almost fainted: the colour was intact because the light had never hit them", explains José María Luzón, who then reveals his favourite: Lago Albano, from the Galleria di Sopra (Lake Albano is a volcanic crater lake just south-east of Rome). Another room displays numerous gouaches handmade in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's atelier, with a view of the Arch of Titus, the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella and the Temple of Vesta.

Travellers on the Grand Tour carried books and sheet music to liven up their trip, but they also acquired new material along the way. "There were more than 40 books on board," says Luzón. Titles like Campi Phlegraei by the erudite British antiquarian William Hamilton and the artist Pietro Fabris, or the volume with 116 etchings from Piranesi's workshop bound in parchment with a gold border. A small book published by Thomas Jenkins, an antiques dealer who acted as a go-between for the British clientele on the Grand Tour, is of particular interest. This copy was intended as publicity to sell the product that appears on the cover, which is an antique vase.

Besides books, the Westmorland haul also provided an insight into the music in vogue among the youth of the time. Composers sold their most recent creations to these young Brits. These unpublished scores can now be heard in the exhibition using a QR code.

But the young travellers could not take everything they liked home with them, so they commissioned copyists to reproduce the works that had made the greatest impact on them. In the hold of the British frigate were packed copies of The Cardsharps by Caravaggio, The Madonna della Seggiola by Raphael, The Callipygian Venus by Cavaliere D'Arpino and Aurora (Dawn) by Guido Reni. Particularly beautiful is the replica on silk of one of the first paintings found in the buried ruins of Pompeii in what is known as the House of Cicero.

The Westmorland in Malaga exhibition can be visited from Monday to Saturday from 10am to 2pm and from 4pm to 7pm, and on Sundays and public holidays from 10am to 2pm. Admission to the centre is a donation of 3 euros, the proceeds of which will go entirely to the social work of the Ciudad de los Niños project in Malaga.