Summer Reading: "Artists’ Journeys That Shaped Our World"

In this book review seen in The Wall Street Journal, Luke Lymen looks at how artists from Hokusai to Morisot and Hockney, often turned experiences of travel into inspirations for transporting works.

Ushibori in Hitachi Province" (circa 1830-33) by Katsushika Hokusai Getty Images

Seneca, that crabby Roman Stoic, once chided a disciple for believing travel could dispel his gloom: “You ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself.” The masters in Travis Elborough’s jaunty Artists’ Journeys That Shaped Our World prove otherwise. In his tidy book, Mr. Elborough, a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, includes 30 artists whose reasons for traveling are as varied as their destinations.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) orbited Mount Fuji’s sacred summit for years, painting the peak and the people living beneath it from dozens of locales. In works such as “Ushibori in Hitachi Province” (ca. 1830-33, above), the mountain looms over its subjects like a watchful god. Hokusai was so moved by the sights he witnessed in his travels that he changed his name to Gakyō Rōjin Manji: “The Old Man Crazy to Paint.” Equally mad about painting was Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), whose nocturnal wanderings around Austria’s Lake Attersee led locals to dub him the Waldschrat (“forest demon”). The destination inspired his most innovative landscapes, in which nature devours a castle, the Schloss Kammer.

For the Flemish painter Alexander Keirincx (1600-52), British castles proved a muse after King Charles I commissioned him to paint the royal residences in Scotland and Yorkshire. Keirincx showed the countryside surrounding these stony manors bathed in a pastoral light—a vision that stoked the popular image of the British landscape as a mythic ideal and helped create the very British genre of house portraiture. This was the landscape, however, that David Hockney (1937-) sought to escape when he decamped for California in 1964, trading rainy Yorkshire for eternal summer in Los Angeles, where he would discover the motif of shimmering swimming pools that became his trademark. 

Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) made a globe-trotting odyssey in pursuit of the lover who’d dumped him. Did he win her back? No. But he did see the ancient sculpture of four continents, whose influence greatly enlivened his work. Berthe Morisot’s (1841-95) travels brought happier romantic tidings: In Normandy, she cultivated her plein-air technique as well as a relationship with Eugène Manet. The two were engaged while painting side by side. They honeymooned on Britain’s Isle of Wight, which Morisot declared “the prettiest place for painting.” Mr. Elborough’s book makes a breezy companion to any summer wanderings.

Book Review as appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2025 as "The Art of Being Where You Are."

Artists' Journeys That Shaped Our World by Travis Elborough. Published by White Lion Press.