The Art of Travel

Types of Travelers and Journeys

Motivations for travel throughout history have been almost as varied as the means of travel. Whether people traveled alone or in groups, on foot, on animals, in caravans, on ships, or using modern modes of transportation like planes, trains, and automobiles, art can capture how and why we move through the world.

Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a Venetian merchant who spent about seventeen years in China—from around 1274 to 1292—during the reign of the Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan (reigned 1260–94), founder of the Yuan dynasty. In 1276, Khubilai’s armies conquered the Chinese capital at Hangzhou with minimal destruction. Sometime after this, Marco Polo visited the city and its West Lake:

Imagine yourself alongside travelers in a snowy landscape through this guided meditation:

Travel is a common theme in traditional Chinese landscape painting. From ancient times, the emperors of China maintained a network of roads and waterways that unified their vast realm and facilitated the movement of people and goods. Owing to this imperial association, images of ordinary travelers on the empire’s roads and rivers connoted the benevolent rule of an enlightened sovereign and evoked an era of peace and prosperity. Rather than documenting the hardships or actual circumstances of any particular journey, images of anonymous characters traveling or working together capture some of the noteworthy sights and scenes a traveler might encounter along the way. Simultaneously, they promote the fundamental ideals of a harmonious society and a well-ordered state.

One of the most enduring motivations for travel is religious devotion. Nearly every major religion—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, among others—has a tradition of pilgrimage: intentional travel to a site of spiritual significance. Christian pilgrims traveled to the Holy Land to walk in the footsteps of Christ or visited more local destinations connected to the lives or relics of the saints. In Islam, pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca is one of the principal duties of all believers. Other holy sites were also visited on a regular basis. Over many centuries, hundreds of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pilgrims braved countless dangers to visit places where the Historical Buddha lived and taught. Pilgrims would sometimes bring gifts, called votive offerings, with them as a donation to the destination site.

Trade was another common motivation for travel and occurred in many forms, but the most famous trade route in history was the Silk Road, the overland trade routes that linked the prosperous Tang empire (618–907) with Central, West, and South Asia. On the Silk Road, foreign merchants joined Buddhist missionaries, diplomatic envoys, translators, craftsmen, entertainers, and other skilled immigrants in a wealthy, worldly environment that offered a ready market for exotic imports, including silver and gold objects, delicate glassware, and even grape wine.

In the twentieth century, travel offered a key means for diplomacy and cultural exchange. Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980), Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, embarked on a tour of Asia accompanying William Howard Taft’s goodwill mission in 1905. This voyage is immortalized in a series of photographs but also through diplomatic gifts that dignitaries, such as the emperor of Japan, bestowed on Roosevelt.

Adventurers, archaeologists, and scholars have long been traversing the globe to conduct research and to explore foreign lands. In the early twentieth century, leisure travel among Europeans and North Americans also became increasingly common. Fascinated by the cultural heritage of Asia and the Middle East, tourists began to expand their horizons by venturing there.

Artists who traveled played a pivotal role in documenting and popularizing their visions of the distant places they visited. Their interactions with other artists and the things they experienced on their journeys contributed to the dispersal of different artistic styles and motifs.

While travel has mostly positive connotations in popular culture today, it’s important to remember the darker sides of travel as well. Not all travel is undertaken by choice: people can be forced to travel as a result of political exile, as well as due to war, famine, disease, economic hardship, environmental disaster, and colonialism. Even when travel is voluntary, it can be dangerous, and this was particularly true in ages past. The physical act of traveling exposed people to potential injuries and diseases, the natural elements were unpredictable and threatened modes of transportation, and there was an inherent unpredictability to being on the road far from home. The recognition of these dangers shaped stories and cultural beliefs.

Traveling Objects

Objects themselves have rich histories and often undertook journeys of their own, whether through trade, gift giving, or collecting. For conservators, the journey of an item is embedded within its material presence; marks, scars, repairs, and other interventions describe the actions of others who have contributed to its present state. The process of conservation involves the synthesis of material evidence and its placement in time, not just to understand an item’s past but to envision its future preservation. Anthropologists have described the trajectories of material items in terms of their lives, biographies, or itineraries, but such notions are intuitively familiar to conservators, whose actions are fundamentally additive to an item’s journey, both materially and through time.

Individual travelers carried things with them that were essential for the journey itself. Clothing and equipment suitable to traversing long distances sometimes set them apart from local residents, and travelers carried personal effects and accessories, such as small books, drinking flasks, and protective amulets, to make the journey easier.

Travelers brought objects acquired on their journeys home with them as well. Holy objects acquired by pilgrims allowed them to bring the blessings of their pilgrimage back from their destination. Images made during travel—whether sketches, paintings, or photographs—captured the experience of the journey for future reflection. Souvenirs purchased during a trip also offered travelers a way of commemorating a journey and gave them something tangible on which to reflect. The advent of commercial global travel networks in many cultures and contexts was accompanied by a flood of photographs, drawings, postcards, mementos, and other means of recording scientific and sentimental experiences abroad. Perhaps the most recognizable artifact of travel over the past 150 years is the picture postcard. These were collected as mementos or mailed to family and friends from abroad, accruing the additional prestige of a foreign stamp and postmark.

Virtual Travel

Most travel we think of involves physically moving between places, but virtual travel (colloquially, “armchair travel”) that takes place in the mind spans time and cultures and is facilitated by books and works of art. Through focused contemplation of a travel account, a map, a cherished souvenir, or images of far-off places, memory and imagination combine to transport someone mentally and to simulate the experience of travel.

Online experiences can offer a twenty-first-century version of virtual travel, with tools like Google Earth allowing us access to almost any destination through our screens. Explore the museum’s digital interactives for some virtual travel of your own: to the museum itself, to places around the world, or to the past.