In 1743, the English painter George Stubbs travelled to Rome, the cultural centre of Europe. Ozias Humphry, the British miniaturist who recorded this journey, says that it was made ‘to convince himself that nature was, and is always, superior to art, whether Greek or Roman; and having received this impression he immediately resolved on returning home’. What Henry James might have called the ‘exquisite provincialism’ of this anecdote is manifest in three features which recur in Scottish and American nineteenth-century fiction: the provincial's need to test his own values against the absolutes of the centre, the complacency with which he confirms his presuppositions and returns unscathed to the province, and the recounting of his journey by the artist, a fellow- provincial who may or may not relish its absurdity.