El Escorial

El Escorial  

Joseph Townsend, 1786 

Watercolour 

It is easy to forget that, in the days before photography, travellers who wanted a visual record of their journey either had to draw it for themselves or commission someone else to draw it for them. Joseph Townsend comes into the first category. The first (1791) edition of his Journey through Spain contains a number of engravings that were made from his own sketches: he even drew the map that formed the frontispiece (see 1.1). In this, Townsend’s own copy of the third edition, he has had nine additional illustrations bound in, eight of them watercolours. 

 This watercolour—unsigned, unlike the rest of the inserts—shows a view of the palace-monastery of El Escorial, with a variety of trees and bushes in the foreground and a group of figures—a woman on a donkey, a man on foot, and a boy with a dog—to add interest and indicate scale. The eye is caught by the trees on the left that have been regularly pollarded to encourage young, supple growth for basket-making and woven fencing, one more instance of Townsend’s sharp interest in rural husbandry, among many other topics.  

 The third edition of A journey through Spain, published in 1814, coincided with the end of the Peninsular War and the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. Townsend took this opportunity to add a new section on ‘the causes of the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy’, which had recently excited ‘universal astonishment’. He attributed the overthrow to ‘bad government’, and the errors and abuses of prime minister Manuel Godoy in particular.  

Title: [El Escorial] 

Author/Artist: Joseph Townsend (1739-1816).     

Technique and Material: Watercolour on paper. 

Dimensions: 180 x 235 mm. 

Published: pasted into the author’s own copy of A Journey through Spain in the years 1786 and 1787, Bath: Gye and Son for the author.  Third edition, two volumes. Volume 1, facing page 267. 

Date: 1814. 

Marks and Inscriptions: None. 

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.