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The
Grand Tour
This type of table was first collected by British travellers
on The Grand Tour in the later eighteenth century. Most were brought to
this country in the ninteenth century. This one was probably bought in
Rome c.1852. The Grand Tour was an educational journey of a year or more
undertaken by wealthy young Englishmen during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Their travels took them principally to Italy, but also to France and the
Low Countries.
Charles Drury Edmund Fortnum (1820-1899)
CDE Fortnum bequeated this table to the Ashmolean Museum in 1899. Born
in 1820, CDE Fortnum was born into a branch of the family made wealthy
by the famous Piccadilly grocery business, Fortnum and Mason. Collecting
and classifying seem to have been in his blood. In his twenties he lived
in Australia and formed a substantial collection of natural history specimens.
On his return to England in 1845, mainly through two successive prudent
marriages to heiress cousins, he became rich enough to spend the rest
of his life as a gentleman connoisseur. Over the next 40 years, he formed
collections of sculpture, ceramics, bronzes, glass, and finger rings,
ranging in date from pre-Classical times to his own century. In the 1880s
Fortnum gave large parts of his collection to the Ashmolean, following
them up with a generous sum of money to transform the old University Galleries
into what is now the Ashmolean Museum building.
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