Travel & Distant Lands

Long before photography, painting was how distant places entered the imagination of those who had never traveled to them. In 18th-century Europe, the aristocratic Grand Tour sent young Britons and northern Europeans to Italy, generating demand for view painters like Canaletto, whose precise vedute of Venice's canals and festivals became prized souvenirs and status symbols carried home to English country houses. Nineteenth-century artists ranged further: Eugène Delacroix's 1832 diplomatic journey to Morocco filled sketchbooks that fed decades of paintings depicting North African life, while Scottish painter David Roberts spent 1838-39 sketching Egypt and the Holy Land for the enormously popular lithographic volumes The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842-49). This wave of Western depiction of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia became known as Orientalism, a term given sharply critical meaning by literary scholar Edward Said in his 1978 book of the same name, which argued that such imagery often flattened real societies into a fantasy of the exotic "Orient" that justified European colonial attitudes. Art historians such as Linda Nochlin extended Said's critique specifically to painting, and while scholarship continues to debate how uniformly this applies across artists as different in intent and method as the ethnographically minded John Frederick Lewis and the harem fantasists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, the critique reshaped how museums now contextualize these works. Beyond Europe, artists were independently depicting travel and distant places: in Edo-period Japan, Utagawa Hiroshige's woodblock series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833-34) mapped an entire pilgrimage road between Edo and Kyoto, later influencing Van Gogh and other Western artists. In the Americas, Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church followed the trail of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to Colombia and Ecuador, translating his South American expeditions into the sensationally popular exhibition painting Heart of the Andes (1859).