Iryna Babenko’s Reviews > Artist's Journey: The travels that inspired the artistic greats > Status Update

Monet and Pissarro visited London’s great museums and galleries almost daily, studying and sketching the watercolours and paintings of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, as well as landscapes and portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, and increasing the breadth of their knowledge.

In June 1940, after the debacle of the evacuation of Dunkirk and with German forces having occupied Paris, foreigners were banned from living in strategically important southern regions of England.

Kandinsky’s first language was German

I don’t know how but so far the introduction was the most interesting chapter…

Before tourism in Japan became popular, Japanese painters didn’t leave their studios to paint landscapes — they either used older painters’ renditions, interpretations of what the sites are supposed to look like or based on literary sources. Only tourism and the need for more realistic pictures of the places as souvenirs made painters go to plein-airs. 🤯

‘From the age of six’, the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) once wrote, ‘I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy nothing I drew was worthy of notice.

Dürer was homosexual.

🤗Paul Cézanne was so unimpressed by the Swiss scenery that he left two unfinished canvases of local views behind when he checked out of his hotel in Neuchâtel.

🤯 He was thirty-eight, and in retrospect it seems almost a miracle that Caravaggio lived that long, continuing to churn out masterpiece after masterpiece while on the run and living under constant threat of execution.