eople have been traveling for millennia , but tourism , or travel for pleasure , is relatively new . In the late 17th century , wealthy young men of Northern Europe began to travel to Venice , Rome , and Florence just to see the local attractions and describe them to jealous friends when they returned home . The “ Grand Tour ,” as it became known , led to the creation of the first guidebooks and travel agencies .
“ View of Trent ” Albrecht Dürer , 1495
Before the invention of railroads , travel was slow and dangerous . Travelers by land risked being robbed by highwaymen ; pirates and hostile weather made sea travel an adventure . The scenery changed gradually but dramatically . Some tourists hired artists to record exotic vistas , while others drew and painted their own pictures . By the end of the 18th century , travel became accessible to the middle classes . Tourists , which now included women , brought their paint boxes , because photography hadn ’ t been invented .
Watercolor was the preferred medium for artists on the road . Before the invention of collapsible tin tubes in the mid-nineteenth century , oil painters had to grind their pigments from powders on a marble slab . The medium was much too cumbersome to carry in a suitcase . Watercolors could be carried in a paint box with cups of pigment suspended in gum arabic , much like the kits sold today . The paintings that resulted were not considered finished artworks in themselves , but sketches for future oil paintings or — for amateur artists — the equivalent of modern snapshots .
When Albrecht Dürer ( 1471-1528 ) took the arduous journey across the Alps from his native Nuremberg to Venice in 1494 , it wasn ’ t just for sightseeing . He seriously wanted to see what the great Italian artists were up to , with the aim of improving his own art . But he eagerly recorded what he saw along the
way in a medium little used at the time . No photograph could be more informative than his rendering of the crenellated towers across the Adige River , dwarfed by the Alps in the background . The foliage and mountains seem to have interested him more than the buildings , many of which are still standing .
As fascinated as he was by the scenery on the way to Venice , Dürer doesn ’ t seem to have had much interest in painting the city itself . That was left for Joseph Mallord William Turner ( 1775-1851 ), John Singer Sargent ( 1856-1925 ), and countless other great watercolorists . If Dürer was the first of the great watercolorists , Turner was the second . More interested in
“ Grand Canal , Venice , Santa
Maria della Salute ” Joseph William
Mallord Turner , 1840
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