Bien qu’il y ait eu des monographies sur les artistes voyageurs britanniquesdu XVIIIème et du début du XIXème siècles, il n’existe aucune enquête de ce quel’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’unappareil 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 aseries of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the MiddleEast, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcelyremembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies andartists’ colonies in Europe that acted as crèches for those would go on to explore lifeand landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years inplaces where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were oftenSpanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were exploredafresh and cities like Tangier became artists’ haunts. Training that prioritized plein airnaturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should becapable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances.At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering andtechnological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into theproduction of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector.Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by Londondealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustratedbooks 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 directlyaddress Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, ormimic 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 ancientruin 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 widerangingsurvey hopes to address some of these issues.This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers andinvestigates 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 ofvisualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.