Adventure, art and architecture: Royall Tyler, a forgotten hispanist in the Spain of 1898

Abstract

This article examines Royall Tyler’s reorientation of Hispanic studies, from Moorish Andalusia to medieval Christian Spain. Drawing on archival material, the article traces this young American art historian’s visits to the Iberian Peninsula that culminated in the publication of Spain: A Study of her Life and Arts (1909). This unaccountably neglected text was pioneering in its exploration of the art of Romanesque Spain, describing, for the first time, uncharted monuments that did not feature on the cultural map of Spain. Part travel guide and part scholarly account, Spain: A Study of her Life and Arts represents a significant missing link between the type of impressionistic vistas of Spain produced by the early romantics and later nineteenth-century travellers and the work of the more thoroughly academic art scholars Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who followed in Tyler’s wake after the First World War.