Rowdy English tourists might have been told to “stay away” from modern Amsterdam, but British tourism was once viewed in a far more positive light, stimulating a continental artistic scene.

A new exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, based on loans of artworks and diaries from three English stately homes, tells the story of the traditional “grand tour” when young Englishmen in particular braved the long roads and rude locals to visit France and Italy.

Although they sowed their wild oats – like foreign visitors to the red light district today – they were credited with stimulating portraiture, cityscapes and an appreciation for Roman antiquity as they sought souvenirs of their travels.

“Nowadays we call it a gap year, a year out, but is it new?” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis. “No – there is nothing new under the sun. The English nobles did exactly the same and they called it the ‘grand tour’. But how it happened, what it cost and how you found your next hotel was less clear to us.”

Thanks to a rare loan from ‘treasure houses’ Holkham Hall in Norfolk, Burghley House in Lincolnshire and Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, the Dutch museum has dug under the surface of these early tourism jaunts.

Not only did they famously inspire Romantic poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron  – travelling earls and dukes also developed a passion for European art, employed countless portrait-makers to document their trips and shipped their collections of artwork and antiquities home again.

Network

Curator Ariane van Suchtelen said however that the exhibition did not specifically address how the young English nobles were seen by the locals in their time. “That’s an interesting question,” she said at a press opening in The Hague.

“Not so much was written about that but they were seen as a source of income. They were probably also complained about as ‘foreigners’…but they attracted English traders and a whole network earning their living from them.”

In Italy, the exhibition shows, the young noblemen sent abroad to grow up and discover the world funded an array of artistic endeavours. Portraitists such as the multi-talented “Taylor Swift of her time” Angelica Kauffman were employed in the 18^th century to picture noblemen such as Brownlow Cecil, 9^th Earl of Exeter, in Naples.

The exhibition suggests that he took a shine to her personally too. The 22-year-old born to an artist father in Switzerland already had “countless admirers” and completed her first pastel portraits at the age of nine as well as being a singer. Having later married a Venetian painter, she lived in a palazzo near what was known as the “English ghetto” and attracted famous names to her salon from foreign nobles to German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Other mementos bought up by the travelling English were disaster shots like Pietro Fabris’s painting, The Eruption of Vesuvius in 1757. The painting, displayed in the exhibition, was bought by Cecil and he is likely to have climbed the volcano like other tourists on a trip some years before it erupted.

Clues

Portraits, meanwhile, often contained clues of someone’s travels such as antiquities bought abroad, famous statues or hints of foreign architecture. “The details…were so that you knew: ‘Oh, he is in Italy! He has been there!” said Van Suchtelen, pointing out a 1774 portrait of Thomas William Coke, a statue to his right and his stomach bulging slightly in a fashionable suit.

Italian vistas were also popular, and a second room contains paintings by artists such as Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, which made their way into a collection at Woburn Abbey.

The journey was not always easy, although the young men, and sometimes women and families, typically paid for porters to hoist them and their possessions over the Alps. Some were not impressed by foreign habits either. “Paris is a filthy hole,” wrote English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in his diary in June 1814.

Diaries

One traveller complained that while he did his best to speak French, noted Van Suchtelen, the locals also did their best not to understand him.

Another complained: “Of all the towns in Italy, I am the least satisfied with Venice…the habits of the people are in some measure restrained by the presence of the English. Still, there is quite enough left to make me believe the Romans the nastiest people in Christendom…if I had not seen the Portuguese.”

The Grand Tour – Destination Italy is on show from September 18 to January 4 at the Mauritshuis in The Hague