Spain & Portugal

Spain and Portugal stand apart from most European countries in the scale and consequence of their engagement with the wider world. The Iberian empires — Spanish in the Americas, Philippines and parts of Africa and Asia; Portuguese in Brazil, Africa, India and the Far East — were the first truly global empires in history, and the wealth they generated transformed the Iberian Peninsula itself into one of the most powerful and culturally productive regions of early modern Europe. The antique prints in this collection document that world — its cities, its landscapes, its monuments and its people — across three centuries of topographical and documentary illustration.

The topographical tradition of Iberian illustration begins in earnest with the great city view publications of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572–1618) included views of Madrid, Seville, Lisbon, Toledo, Granada and other major Iberian cities that remain the definitive visual record of these places in the pre-modern period. Seville, as the commercial capital of the Spanish Atlantic empire and the seat of the Casa de Contratacion that controlled all trade with the Americas, received particular attention — its bustling waterfront, its cathedral and its social world depicted with a specificity that makes these images invaluable historical documents.

The Moorish heritage of southern Spain generated a distinct strand of Iberian illustration that intensified through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Romanticism made the exotic and the historic fashionable subjects for artistic attention. The Alhambra at Granada, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, the alcazars of Seville and Toledo — these monuments of Islamic Spain attracted artists and illustrators who found in them a visual vocabulary quite different from the classical and Gothic traditions of northern Europe. The publication of James Cavanah Murphy’s Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) and similar works brought these subjects to a wide European audience and established the conventions of Orientalist illustration in a specifically Iberian context.

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) — Napoleon’s disastrous attempt to subjugate Spain and Portugal — generated an enormous body of illustrative material that combined military documentation with topographical observation. Artists accompanying the British forces under Wellington produced views of the landscapes, cities and fortifications of the Peninsula that are invaluable records of the physical world in which the campaign was fought. These images are of considerable interest to collectors of military history as well as those focused on Iberian topography.

Portugal, though smaller and less frequently depicted than Spain, generated its own distinct illustrative tradition centred on Lisbon and the remarkable landscape of a country whose Atlantic coastline, river valleys and hill towns provided consistently attractive subjects for European artists. The rebuilding of Lisbon after the catastrophic earthquake of 1755 was documented in prints that record both the destruction wrought and the extraordinary speed of reconstruction under the Marquis of Pombal.

For collectors, antique prints of Spain and Portugal offer material of unusual historical richness and visual variety. The combination of imperial grandeur, Moorish heritage, Napoleonic warfare and some of the most dramatic landscapes in Europe gives Iberian illustration a breadth that few other regional collecting areas can match, and significant original examples from the major topographical traditions are increasingly scarce.