Towards the Sun

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 and others. While there have been monographs on British artist-travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been no equivalent survey of what the writer, Henry Blackburn, described as 'artistic travel' a hundred years later. By 1900, the 'Grand Tourist' became a 'globe-trotter' equipped with a camera, and despite the development of 'knapsack photography', visual recording by the old media of oil and watercolour on-the-spot sketching remained ever-popular.

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 creches 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 prioritised 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.

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 visualisation and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

About the Author

Kenneth McConkey is completing an Emeritus Fellowship in Art History at the Leverhulme Trust. The author of numerous books, exhibition catalogues and articles, on British Art between 1880 and 1920.