The Painted Voyage

Résumé du livre

From Patagonia to Peking, the South Seas to the Sahara, western artists have played a vital role in the exposure of unfamiliar lands. From Jacques Le Moyne's paintings of Florida in 1564 to the development of portable cameras in the late-19th century, artists were a habitual feature of explorational, scientific and diplomatic voyages. The works of these travelling artists were at first appreciated more for their scientific value than for artistic merit. By the 18th century, however, painters such as William Hodges began to regard exotic journeys as an alternative to the European Grand Tour. With the 19th-century fashion for Orientalism, adventurous travel and great art were no longer regarded as mutually exclusive. This book looks at the ways in which travelling artists influenced early western attitudes towards distant lands, and examines how far the artists' own vision of these places was distorted, affected by factors as diverse as changing artistic fashions, the demands of colonial propaganda and the frequent need to work from memory. Jacob's text contains many anecdotes relating to the lives of these people. The illustrations form a visual record of the lands visited and include a large number of formerly little-known works.