Grand Tourists and Artists

The end of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as the British occupation of Corfu, eased travel to Greece and Albania. During the 19th century numerous travellers passed through the country, several visiting Butrint – long famed among antiquarians for its Virgilian connections.

One such tourist inscribed his initials and the date on the Byzantine fresco by the West Gate to the Acropolis, AD 1789 P.A.M.. Others, like Henry Cook and Captain De La Poer Beresford, came as artists to paint and record the romanticism of the famous place and its picturesque ruins.

The best-known artist of this period was the painter Edward Lear, who, during his residence on Corfu in the late 1850s paid several visits to the mainland, and sketched and painted Butrint and its landscape. Others too were attracted to this landscape. The Irish aristocrat Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh, notwithstanding being born paraplegic, hunted at Ksamili and documented this in one of the earliest photographs of the area.