Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

details seriously. Delacroix was among the painters to visit Douce’s friend Samuel Rush
Meyrick, ‘the father of the systematic study of arms and armour’ in 1825 to inspect and sketch
his collection. 123 This has long been known, but a study of the visitors’ book from Meyrick’s
house, recently acquired by the Wallace Collection, has added to the list of French painters who
used Meyrick’s armour as source material. 124 Géricault visited the collection in 1820 at a period
when he was, briefly, interested in the depiction of armour, especially horse armour and Paul
Delaroche, Hippolyte Bellangé and Eugène Lami all, it now appears, came to see the collection
in 1822. As Meyrick wrote in the Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1826: ‘There now exists a
feeling for correctness of costume and accessaries [sic], both here and on the Continent, in
painting…that cannot retrograde.’ 125
From reading about the past and depicting historic episodes, actual and fictional, it was
but a single step to enacting them in real life, the ultimate engaged antiquarianism, the dance of
death as a dance of life. Scott was expert at this, a fact reflected probably in his choice of a hero,
Quentin Durward, who was a Scottish archer. While the Scottish Company of Archers was a
medieval institution it was also a modern one having just been revived by Scott himself for
George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822. A fuller account of ‘the King’s jaunt’, as it became
known, belongs to the discussion of politics in a later chapter and it was probably the most
extensive and consequential enactment of the past during the period. It was certainly not the only
one, however. The Eglinton Tournament of 1839 would never have happened without Ivanhoe.
Indeed by the end of the 1820s past and present, fact and fiction, had achieved almost complete
reciprocity in the antiquarian imagination, which was now, largely, the same thing as popular
taste.
While an interest in topography and natural scenery might always have led to an
increased appreciation of history and mythology, the reverse was also now possible. The
antiquarian narrative could be projected back onto the physical landscape. It was Dawson
Turner’s friend and travelling companion, the naturalist Joseph Banks, who ‘discovered’ the
remarkable geological formations on the Hebridean island of Staffa in 1772. Staffa thereafter
123
Duffy, ‘French Artists and the Meyrick armoury’, p.284.
124
Duffy, ‘French Artists and the Meyrick armoury’.
125
Quoted in Duffy, ‘French Artists and the Meyrick armoury’, p.285.
139