Part of the Cathedral, Burgos

Part of the Cathedral, Burgos 

Thomas Shotter Boys after David Roberts, 1837 

Hand-coloured lithograph 

This view of Burgos Cathedral is of the north-east corner in front of the Chapel of the Condestable otherwise known as the Chapel of the Purification of the Virgin. The chapel was built between 1482 and 1494 by the Spanish architect Simón de Colonia at the behest of the sixth Constable of Castile Pedro Fernández de Velasco and his wife doña Mencía de Mendoza y Figueroa who are buried there. David Roberts, however, juxtaposes this power couple’s ostentatious display of wealth with the ramshackle houses that were built—as was common practice across medieval and early-modern Europe—right against the cathedral walls. 

The view also appeared as an engraving in Thomas Roscoe’s The Tourist in Spain. Biscay and the Castiles (1837).  Roscoe deplored the way the ‘mean dwelling-houses’ about the base of the cathedral destroyed the integrity and harmony of the view. ‘But as the eye travels upward over those clustering pillars which climb along the turrets with the slenderness and delicacy of reeds, and finds itself among that forest of decorations, statues, fretwork, foliage, filagree, and tapering turrets…we feel ourselves in presence of one of the triumphs of art’ (p. 72). 

Nevertheless, Roberts was clearly intrigued and amused by the architectural ingenuity and makeshift construction of the houses whose life and colour contrast sharply with the rather ghostly rendering of the ‘tapering turrets’. His loose, fluid rendering of the dwelling houses and their occupants brings the cheerful scene to life and rather puts the Constables’ mausoleum into the shade. 

The lithograph is attributed to the English watercolourist Thomas Shotter Boys (1803-1874), one of several lithographers who were recruited by Roberts’s publishers, Hodgson & Graves, to draw Roberts’s sketches onto lithographic stone. However, Roberts was ‘grievously’ disappointed with their work and spent most of the summer of 1837 reworking the drawings on the stone himself. The only drawings he appreciated and did not touch were those by Louis Haghe.  

Title: Part of the Cathedral – Burgos. 

Author/Artist: Thomas Shotter Boys (1803-1874, lithographer) after David Roberts (1796-1864, artist). 

Technique and Material: Hand-coloured lithograph on paper. 

Dimensions: 405 x 280 mm (image), 550 x 370 mm (page). 

Published: Plate 7 from Picturesque sketches in Spain taken during the years 1832 & 1833. London: Hodgson & Graves, 1837. 

Date: 1837. 

Marks and Inscriptions: on the plate, lower left: ‘Part of the Cathedral – Burgos’; lower right: ‘D. Roberts. 1837’. 

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.