400 Years of Travel Diaries: The Art of Sketching

Caught between travel guides and artists’ books, the travel diary has swung between a journalistic documentary style and visual expression. It is a literary and artistic genre that is composite and plural, heterogeneous and subjective. This book illustrates the great scientific and journalistic adventures in history, from the Egyptian campaign to the war in Iraq, while describing the artistic techniques and contemporary trends in travel sketchbooks. It also explores more intimate territories, capturing the essence of our world to preserving the remembrances. Between text and image, this stunning collection travels through the centuries revealing the most beautiful pages of a very human adventure. The book ends with a complete overview of the different genres (from the educational trip to reportage) and types of travel diaries (from sketchbooks to audiovisual works), as well as the very diverse techniques used by different artists (from pencil work to the graphic arts and mixed techniques). As memories of other places, travel notebooks chronicle the experience of getting to know the place we visit and ourselves. They have been companions of artists from Dürer to Philip Delord, going through the orientalists and explorers.