Matching Summer Travel Destinations to Famous Paintings

Feature image: Paul Signac, The Port of Saint-Tropez via Wikimedia Commons/Google Arts & Culture

Summertime is when travel escalates, when flights fill up months in advance, and itineraries start multiplying before the trip even begins. In the middle of that rush, it helps to stay connected to the roots of a place rather than just its highlights. Long before travel accounts and location tags, painters were already doing that work, setting up easels on beaches, in cafés, and on rooftops to get a place's actual light and mood down before it changed. Whether you're traveling to these destinations or staying home this summer, these paintings will transport you.

Nice was the destination that convinced Henri Matisse to stop traveling. He arrived in the winter of 1917, chasing a changing climate. He ended up staying, on and off, for the rest of his life, captivated by a quality of morning light he later said he could not describe without sounding foolishly happy about it. He rented rooms first at the Hôtel Beau Rivage and later at the Hôtel Méditerranée, a Rococo building he fondly called fake, absurd, delicious, and it was there that he began the long series of paintings now known as his Nice Interiors. His Interior, Nice, painted in 1919, shows his favored model of the period, Antoinette Arnoux, seated by an open French window with the Mediterranean just visible through the shutters, the same balcony he returned to again and again as a way of linking the room to the sea beyond it.

Arles gave Vincent van Gogh one of his most enduring subjects. He arrived in February 1888 having grown tired of Paris, drawn south by friends who described Provence as a land of blue tints and cheerful colors, and within weeks he had set up his easel beside a small drawbridge on the edge of town, one he thought looked almost Japanese in its structure. He painted the Langlois Bridge four separate times that spring, along with several drawings and a watercolor, each version catching the canal, the road curving into the distance, and the linens laid out on the far bank to bleach in the sun. The original bridge no longer stands, but a replica was rebuilt a few kilometers from its original site after the war. Visitors can still stand beside it today, with a small marker holding up a reproduction of the painting for comparison.

In the summer of 1875, Berthe Morisot arrived on England's south coast for her honeymoon with Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard Manet, settling for several weeks in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. She spent much of the stay working, often setting up her easel directly in their hotel room at Globe Cottage to paint the view from the window. Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight shows her husband looking out over the cottage garden toward the harbor, two fashionably dressed women passing on the street below, and the sails of visiting yachts crowding the water beyond, painted during the annual Cowes Regatta. Morisot found the elevated view frustratingly difficult to translate onto canvas, writing to her sister that it was very pretty to see and very ugly to paint. However, the finished work became one of the paintings she chose to show at the second Impressionist exhibition the following year.

Joaquín Sorolla spent the summer of 1909 back home on the beaches of Valencia, fresh off a wildly successful exhibition in New York that had drawn over 160,000 visitors and earned him portrait commissions from figures including President William Howard Taft. Walk on the Beach shows his wife, Clotilde, and their eldest daughter, María, strolling along the shore at Malvarrosa in white dresses that catch every color of the late-afternoon sun, an ability to turn an ordinary walk into a study of how the sun moves across white fabric and wet sand. Sorolla painted a companion portrait of his youngest daughter, Elena, on the same beach around the same time, and kept Walk on the Beach in his own collection for the rest of his life rather than selling it.

Emma Ciardi was born in Venice in 1879 into a family of painters, trained by her father Guglielmo Ciardi, a landscape painter associated with Italy's proto-Impressionist Macchiaioli movement. She began exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1903. She continued to do so almost every year until 1932, developing a soft, atmospheric style closely associated with the city's canals, gardens, and quiet corners rather than its grand tourist views. Her painting Rio de S. Barnaba, Venice captures a narrow canal dissolving into silvery light, one of many Venetian scenes that earned her solo exhibitions in London and considerable acclaim in the United States during the 1920s. She died in Venice in 1933 and was honored two years later with a retrospective at the same Biennale she had shown at for three decades.

Paul Gauguin sold off thirty of his paintings to fund a trip to Tahiti in 1891, looking for a life simpler than the one he had in Paris, and settled into a bamboo hut in Mataiea, a village on the island's southern coast. Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), painted the following year, shows two women wading into the surf near his home. At the same time, a fisherman works in the background, the whole scene rendered in the saturated pinks and greens Gauguin used to translate the island's color for a European audience already primed by novels romanticizing Tahitian life. He later admitted the palette owed more to his imagination than to the actual volcanic sand, which was closer to brown than the pink he preferred to paint.

Every one of these painters arrived at their destination first, then spent years trying to get its light exactly right. That discipline is worth remembering the next time a place lands on a travel list for reasons that are hard to name, and it's just as useful for anyone staying put this summer. Chances are, someone with a paintbrush already worked out the explanation, and left it hanging in a museum a few time zones from wherever the summer is headed, or from wherever you happen to be sitting right now.

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