The Image of travelling: Travel Paintings and Writings by the Danish Golden Age Painter Martinus Rørbye

The Danish painter Martinus Rørbye was among of the first artists to reinvent the traditions of the genre of travel painting in the 1830s. His changes and developments of a new complex pictorial strategy were in many ways an answer to the changes in society, especially the advent of tourism. The new travel image had its focus on concurrency, everyday life and the secular world, resulting in images that anticipated the photographic travel image, the snapshot and the travel postcard. The advent of this new strategy proved to have a very long after-life, as tourists and travellers of today still lean a great deal on the image codes that Rørbye and his fellow artists of the 1830s invented. Travel photos today are very similar to Rørbye’s travel sketching and paintings, since the absence of tourists and non-aesthetic settings are still key passwords in our strategies of taking pictures. We have all tried waiting to press the button until all the tourists are out of sight, and we all want to make our journey look like a special and unique trip by identifying ourselves as true travellers off the beaten track instead of ordinary tourists on the highway of tourism. These patterns of anti-tourism were founded in the 1830s, after which many artists staged their journeys as a trip to Arcadia, despite the fact that many of their travel diaries reported a different narrative.