The Art of Travel

If you spent time on the sunny Mediterranean beaches of the South of France, you were in good company, artistically speaking. Provence’s distinctly table-shaped Mont-Sainte-Victoire features in many of Paul Cézanne’s most appealing and desirable works, and the artist was a native of the region, born in Aix. Van Gogh, meanwhile, was an import to the area, having arrived in Arles in February 1888 after a period spent living in Paris. He sought to establish an artist’s colony there, enticing his friend Paul Gauguin for a visit and hoping the sun-drenched landscape would appeal to him before an argument saw Gauguin depart in haste, leaving Van Gogh alone and despondent. In the 20th Century, Henri Matisse spent time in Nice, while Picasso sunned himself on the Riviera and moved around Antibes, Vallauris, Vauvenargues and Mougins with various companions and friends including Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. The South of France was also where he explored ceramics on a substantial scale, working in collaboration with the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris.

The Alps have attracted tourists and artists in every season, but the mountain range is perhaps most closely associated with the Sublime in 18th century art, literature and philosophy for its ability to inspire awe in the viewer. J.M.W. Turner, perhaps England’s most celebrated landscape painter, first visited the Alps in the summer of 1802 during the brief European peace that followed the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, returning with sketchbooks bursting with studies and ideas. Several of his most beloved works were inspired by his various journeys to the region, including his three views of the Rigi stretching above the Lake of Lucerne, all painted in 1842. The Blue Rigi is now in the Tate and The Red Rigi in the National Gallery of Victoria, while The Dark Rigi was sold to a private collection by Dickinson. A century later, the ex-pat American John Singer Sargent was producing some of his finest landscape watercolours on Alpine hiking trips undertaken in company with his family.

If you spent your summer across the Atlantic in New England, you may have visited the fashionable Hamptons, which became a lively centre for the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-20th Century. Jackson Pollock and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, lived and worked in East Hampton, while Willem de Kooning also had a studio nearby. Robert Motherwell, the painter and printmaker, spent time out in Montauk at the tip of the peninsula, while Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein had a home in Southampton.

If rural Maine was more your scene, then you’d have been in equally fine company. Some of the most sought-after American landscape painters of the 19th and 20th Centuries drew inspiration from the forests, mountains and coastline of Maine, from Winslow Homer in his Prout’s Neck studio to Edward Hopper on Cape Elizabeth. On the Penobscot Bay, Fairfield Porter owned Spruce Head Island, while the Wyeth family lived and painted on Allen Island off Port Clyde and Frank Weston Benson taught American Impressionism in Portland. George Bellows, Childe Hassam, Fitz Henry Lane, John Marin…the list goes on and on.

But it’s not even necessary to leave Great Britain to find hotbeds of artistic activity and inspiration. Several Dickinson team members enjoyed family holidays in Cornwall this summer, listening to the ebb and flow of the waves crashing against the rocky Cornish coastline – just as Dame Barbara Hepworth did nearly a century ago. Hepworth and her second husband, fellow artist John Nicholson, moved to Cornwall in 1939 at the outbreak of War. This move marked a turning point in Hepworth’s life and career.

Hepworth, Nicholson and their children arrived in St Ives where, inspired by the Cornish seaside, Hepworth began sculpting oval and spherical forms, curved and interrupted by hollows or piercings, with wire cords stretching across the hollows. She wrote excitedly: ‘I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish land and sea-scape. The horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excited one’s sense of form.’

In September 1949, 10 years after her arrival, Hepworth acquired the Trewyn Studio in the centre of St Ives, now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Her large-scale bronze River Form, the centrepiece of Dickinson’s 2018 Frieze Masters stand, was inspired by the Cornish coast, conceived in 1965 and cast in 1973. Nicholson, meanwhile, was also inspired by Cornwall, and is considered one of the leading members of the so-called St Ives School, a pioneering modernist group from the 1940s to 1960s. Other notable figures included Christopher (Kit) Wood, Alfred Wallis, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon, among others.

Perhaps your travels took you further north, especially those keen shots ready for the Glorious Twelfth. The Scottish highlands, covered in purple heather, welcomed a host of sporting artists over the centuries, foremost among them Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (1851), originally commissioned for the Palace of Westminster and now in the Scottish National Gallery, can be considered the quintessential sporting painting by one of Queen Victoria’s favourite artists. Another royal favourite was Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A., himself a keen shot and lively draughtsman who captured social anecdotes with panache. Having originated as a specialist gallery in sporting pictures as well as Old Masters, Dickinson has sold numerous works by these artists as well as other leading names in the genre such as Archibald Thorburn and Richard Ansdell, R.A.