In my application for the Abbey Fellowship I mentioned that I was fascinated by artists whose biographical histories have included travel from Wales to study in Rome, particularly Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones, whose development had been influenced by the culture of Italy. The terrain around Rome was of considerable significance to artists in the past. With that in mind I made a number of excursions from the city, and recreated some of the journeys made by Jones in the landscape in the Roman Campagna area to look at places artists visited on the Grand Tour. Landscape painting underwent many changes in the eighteenth century, becoming a genre in its own right, and it was fascinating to rediscover some of the approaches that followed on from Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Poussin. The excellent library at the BSR has been a great place to research C17th and C18th artists and also to use the maps and prints as a comparison to how it looks in the present day. I was able to read a number of diary entries and records of first hand reports. I also learned a lot from talking to visiting researchers over dinner which proved very helpful - the aleatory benefit of random seating allocation.

— Neil McNally