The Journey and the Stranger

To travel is to leave the familiar and encounter the foreign – and to become a stranger oneself. Art has followed travellers in every age: pilgrims, kings, young aristocrats, artists in search of the exotic and emigrants on their way to a new life. We follow the journey from the pilgrim routes of the Middle Ages and the procession of the Magi, through the Grand Tour and Orientalism, to Gauguin’s Tahiti, the highways of Japan and the emigrants of the 19th century.

• Pilgrims and Caravans – Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• The Magi – Strangers from the East
• The Prodigal Son and the New Worlds – the 17th Century
• The Grand Tour – the Educational Journey to Italy
• Orientalism – the Imagined Orient
• The Artist as Wanderer – Courbet, Gauguin and Aguéli
• Roads in China and Japan
• Emigrants and Refugees – the 19th Century to the Present