Towards the Sun

Bien qu’il y ait eu des monographies sur les artistes voyageurs britanniques
du XVIIIème et du début du XIXème siècles, il n’existe aucune enquête de ce que
l’écrivain Henry Blackburn décrivait de « voyage artistique » un siècle plus tard.
A partir de 1900, le « Grand Touriste » est devenu un globe-trotteur muni d’un
appareil photo et, malgré le développement de la photographie instantanée,
l’enregistrement visuel immédiat en huile et aquarelle reste le plus répandu.
Kenneth McConkey’s exciting new book explores the complex reasons for this in a
series of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the Middle
East, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcely
remembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies and
artists’ colonies in Europe that acted as crèches for those would go on to explore life
and landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years in
places where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were often
Spanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were explored
afresh and cities like Tangier became artists’ haunts. Training that prioritized plein air
naturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should be
capable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances.
At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering and
technological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into the
production of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector.
Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by London
dealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustrated
books recording those exotic parts of the world that were newly available to the tourist,
traveller, explorer, emigrant, or colonial civil servant.
These works were not, however, value-neutral, and in some instances, they directly
address Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, or
mimic indigenous ways of life. Behind each there is a range of interesting questions.
Does experience live up to expectation? Is the street more desirable than the ancient
ruin or sacred site? How were older ideas of the ‘picturesque’ reborn in an age when
‘Grand Tours’ once confi ned to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey’s wideranging
survey hopes to address some of these issues.
This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and
investigates artists including Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery,
Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other under-researched British artists.
Drawing the strands together, it redefi nes the picturesque, by considering issues of
visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.