Artists on the Move

Through travel, artists became exposed to different techniques, styles, materials, and iconographies, while at the same time disseminating their own knowledge and traditions wherever they went.

Drawing was the preferred medium of traveling artists to record what they encountered on the road thanks to its relative ease and the portability of materials.

Artists undertook journeys for a variety of reasons. Some left their homes voluntarily to hone skills, pursue work opportunities, or satisfy a curiosity to see faraway lands. Others fled to escape hardship or persecution. The yearning for tranquility caused a number of them to withdraw to remote places, while many more were attracted to major political and cultural centers. 

This drawing is the first in a series of twenty in which Federico Zuccaro (ca. 1540–1609) depicted the early life of his older brother, the artist Taddeo. Here the young boy says farewell to his family as he sets out to train in Rome. Two guardian angels escort him, providing protection.

The body language and facial expressions of Taddeo and his family members betray a range of emotions associated with travel: anxiety, excitement, and sadness.

For centuries, Rome was an important destination for artists. It served as an ideal classroom for those who wished to expand their knowledge through drawing after ancient monuments and Renaissance masterpieces. In addition, the city was home to a large consumer market—including the papal court—that frequently commissioned and acquired art.

In this drawing the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) depicted the ruins of the Roman imperial palace stand overgrown with vegetation and devoid of humans.

The inscription in the lower right corner indicates that he made this drawing while a student at the French Academy in Rome, an outpost of the French Royal Academy. As part of his training, Fragonard completed numerous studies of ancient monuments to build up a repertoire of architectural forms. This superb, highly finished drawing was probably sent to the Royal Academy as evidence of the artist’s progress.

Struck by the novelty, strangeness, and beauty of unfamiliar environments, traveling artists often drew their surroundings, including sweeping landscapes, sprawling cities, and the local flora and fauna. Some of these drawings were intended to be finished works of art. Others functioned as memory aids that could be returned to later and reworked into larger compositions.

The Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) used watercolor almost exclusively to record a wooded landscape in England, his adoptive home, where he arrived in 1632 at the invitation of King Charles I. He rendered the lush vegetation in rich greens, yellows, and browns, and the distant hills in blue.

Working primarily as a portrait painter for the English aristocracy, Van Dyck spent moments of leisure exploring his surroundings and capturing them in vibrant hues.

Early on the morning of April 14, 1858, Edward Lear (1812–1888) had little time to spare in the ancient city of Petra (in present-day Jordan) before having to flee from angry locals who tried to extort money from him. He quickly sketched the amphitheater and the surrounding sandstone rocks in black chalk.

Traveling artists favored dry media, such as chalk, metalpoint, and pencil, because they were portable and required minimal preparation.

To speed up his process, Lear took notes on the sheet indicating colors to use—such as dark red, ochre, and chocolate—to recreate the effects of the rising sun. He added ink and watercolor at a later date.

Using a variety of marks—straight strokes, dots, squiggles, and gently curved lines—Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) depicted the sprawling wheat fields in Arles, in southern France.

Van Gogh made this drawing after fleeing Paris, where he felt a sense of bewilderment, writing: “When one is tired one no longer understands anything and you feel as if you are lost.”

Despite his move to the countryside, Van Gogh was unable to escape city life entirely. In the upper register of the sheet he drew the factories, row houses, churches, and railroad of Arles.

Traveling artists drew the people they encountered in order to commemorate new acquaintances, but frequently they treated these likenesses as interesting motifs or preparatory material for their art.

The Flemish artist Roelandt Savery (1576–1639) encountered this bearded man in Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic), where he arrived at the invitation of Emperor Rudolph II. He captured this likeness in metalpoint, a portable material that requires no preparation, and later reinforced the outlines in pen and ink.

To aid his memory, he jotted down the colors and names of the garments.

In the bottom-right corner of the sheet Savery wrote, in Dutch, that he drew this figure “from life.”

Artists often approached their subjects with preconceptions, which are reflected in the representations they produced. This was particularly true when they portrayed people of other religions, races, or nations. Rather than focusing on commonalities, artists emphasized difference by exaggerating physical features, highlighting the strangeness of clothing, and depicting activities that countered European norms. Consequently, their images reinforced and perpetuated stereotypes about foreigners.

In this sketch, the French artist Alexandre Gabriel Decamps (1803–1860) depicted two seated Turkish soldiers carrying on a conversation. Their garments—baggy trousers and a fez—their skin tones, and their exaggerated, almost cartoonish facial features are Decamps’s way of indicating foreignness.

Decamps traveled extensively in Asia Minor and North Africa in 1827–28, then spent the rest of his career producing images similar in style and subject, perpetuating a stereotypical Western European view of the region.

Here, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) drew the features of a young Tahitian woman in a simplified, almost abstract manner.

The French artist, who first learned about Tahiti at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and from various publications, envisioned what he described as “happy inhabitants of a forgotten paradise in Oceania.” When he arrived on the island in 1891, he quickly realized that European colonizers had significantly altered Maohi culture.

The sitter’s Western-style blouse is a sign of that change and reflects Gauguin’s disappointment.

In an era when mechanical reproductions were still relatively rare, the act of drawing allowed artists to keep a record of what they encountered while traveling, learn about their environments, and preserve what they deemed most important.