Barcelona

Barcelona  

Richard Ford, 1831 

Pencil and watercolour 

In this on-the-spot watercolour drawing, Ford depicts a hazy view of Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, from an elevated viewpoint, looking across the hills toward the city in the distant plain. The blue sea is seen on the horizon, and the Montjuic hill rises above the city on the right. 

By the early nineteenth century Barcelona had become an industrialised and increasingly populated city, thanks to its trade with the Americas and a flourishing textile industry.  In his 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home, Ford presented Catalonia as different from the rest of Spain in architecture, customs and manners, and the economy. He recommended that travellers see Tarragona and Barcelona for their cathedrals, the Pyrenees, and the convent of Montserrat, but he also asserted that religious architecture was more ‘Norman Gothic’ than in the rest of peninsula. Alluding to Barcelona’s cotton manufacture, he described Catalonia as the Lancashire of Spain, and Barcelona as its Manchester. The Catalans were ‘neither French nor Spaniards’, and the region was the ‘strength and weakness of Spain’, because it hankered after the early independence it once enjoyed in the middle ages before the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile in the fifteenth century.  

Title: Barcelona.  

Author/Artist: Richard Ford (1796-1858).    

Technique and Material:  Pencil and watercolour on paper.  

Size: 140 x 280 mm.     

Published: n/a. 

Date: Autumn 1831.  

Marks and Inscriptions: none.  

Institution: Ford Family Collection.