Art and Travel from the artist Agnes Canuto

Travel, I am talking essentially about leisure travel, is a medium of permanent exchange with art. If art can be the thread of the journey, through visits to monuments, museums or picturesque sites (we go to Egypt to see the Pyramids before meeting contemporary Egyptians), on the other hand, the journey can be a source of inspiration for creators.

The origin of these cultural journeys can be found in the European aristocracy. From the end of the Middle Ages, but especially in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The sons – much more rarely the daughters – of the wealthiest nobility went on “le Grand Tour“(in French in the text) because life is not only learned from books and libraries. First in their own country, their destination covered the whole of Europe, with a predilection for the southern countries, Italy in particular, then Greece, and finally the whole Mediterranean basin.

The purpose of this long journey, which could last several years depending on the wealth of the traveller’s family, was primarily to finalize the education of these young people. It usually took place after a university education and came to complete it. But not only that… This initiatory journey encouraged the creation of networks among the European elite and allowed encounters, adventures, emotions, discovery, pleasures including sexual ones, even if a young man was generally accompanied by a tutor or a mentor.

Many of those who went on this “Grand Tour” brought back picturesque works “worth painting”, as well as archaeological artefacts, or were represented in their peregrinations…In other words, theu brought back souvenirs, both objects of recognition and pride, which gave rise to the first collections in ” cabinets of curiosities ” that one was happy to share with the intellectual elite.

This “Grand Tour” of the aristocratic youth, and later of the upper-middle class,was thus at the origin of the Erasmus Student Program, tourism, and museography.

Travel is also a source of inspiration for artists, painters and poets, especially as young travellers also had the duty to record their impressions, sometimes giving birth to masterpieces such as the travel diaries of Eugène Delacroix or the stories of Stendhal, Flaubert, Goethe or the poems of Lord Byron.

Exoticism, change of scenery and confrontation with other people, modify and nourish the thought and view of the creators.

Today, travel is the inspiration for many cultural creations, in all sectors of creation, cinema, visual arts, music, dance, fiction, poetry…

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