LONDON.- This groundbreaking new book explores the complex history of the artist-traveller 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. McConkey 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 afield.

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 confined to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey’s wideranging survey hopes to address some of these issues.

Beautifully illustrated, this book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and investigates artists including James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Charles Conder, Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other rarely seen British (and Irish, Canadian, Australian and American) artists. Drawing the strands together, it redefines the picturesque, by considering issues of visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

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, he is currently working on a major exhibition on the work of Sir John Lavery for the National Gallery of Ireland.