Artist escapes: 7 travel destinations that inspired famous painters 

Cape Cod

On a hooked peninsula at the southeast end of Massachusetts, Cape Cod is a dreamy vacation destination that has also been a major artist retreat since Charles Webster Hawthorne founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899.

One famous visitor was Edward Hopper, who was introduced to the area by his wife, Josephine. The couple built a home in Truro, along the Outer Cape, and spent dozens of summers there. During these visits, Hopper painted more than 100 works that embody his unique vision of American life.

At the very tip of the Cape is Provincetown, one of America’s oldest artist colonies. Creatives of all stripes — from Patti LuPone and Mary Oliver to Franz Kline and Milton Avery — have passed through the town. It was a major outpost for Abstract Expressionists, due in part to influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who opened a summer art school there in 1935. Helen Frankenthaler studied with Hoffman one summer and eventually returned with her then-husband, Robert Motherwell. The area became their summer retreat for nearly a decade.

Tangier

The port city of Tangier, Morocco, has long been a bridge between Africa and Europe. Built on a coastal hillside, its Moorish architecture, labyrinthine Medina and mélange of cultures has charmed the artistic imagination for centuries. Henri Matisse captured its vibrant interiors while Francis Bacon — who came often to visit his great love Peter Lacy — was captivated by the city’s exotic lifestyle and striking landscape.

The cultural openness in Tangier attracted writers and artists alike, including Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Joan Miró and William S. Burroughs. But before any of these luminaries found refuge on its shores, artists like Rudolph Ernst painted romanticised scenes of daily life in the Middle East. With careful rendering of the textiles, tiles and curiosities of the area, Ernst’s oeuvre captivated audiences back home in Europe.

Venice

Venice is one of the world’s oldest cultural centres, and its winding canals and ornate palaces have sparked wonder through the ages. James McNeill Whistler, Paul Signac and Claude Monet were entranced by its waterways and architectural details. For the English artist J.M.W. Turner, Venice inspired many of his late masterpieces. Meanwhile, modernists like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, who visited together in the 1950s, each wove the visual layers of the city into their artistic languages.

Today, the art world flocks to La Serenissima for the Venice Biennale, a global stage for groundbreaking art (in even years) and architecture (in odd) that dates back to 1895. Ai Weiwei, Simone Leigh and Olafur Eliasson are just a few of the practitioners who have re-examined the city’s history with powerful installations at the festival. Ever evolving, Venice’s singular atmosphere continues to stir the creative imagination, making it not just a subject, but a muse.

Kyoto

A place where tradition and innovation intersect, Kyoto is a bastion of heritage craft as well as a burgeoning centre of contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama studied at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, while the city’s Zen gardens had an enduring influence on the work of Isamu Noguchi. After a 1983 visit to the City of 10,000 Shrines, David Hockney turned to collage to challenge what he saw as the limitations of Western art. He said of this body of work, which draws upon the gardens and architecture of the city: ‘It brought me closer to the way we actually experience the activity of seeing, and it actually led me back to drawing and painting, with a whole new sense of the possibilities to be found there.’

In 1956, Kyoto was Andy Warhol’s first stop on a two-month tour through Europe and Asia, and he returned once more in 1974. Japanese aesthetics and culture seeped into his oeuvre, particularly his Kiku series. Named for the Japanese word for chrysanthemum, the portfolio of more than 300 screenprints is based on the iconography of the Royal House of Japan.

Cadaqués

Situated on a horseshoe-shaped bay along Catalonia’s Costa Brava, Cadaqués was home to famed Spanish Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí for much of his adult life. The artist once claimed ‘I have been made in these rocks. Here have I shaped my personality,’ and the town’s rugged coastline mirrors the landscape of some of his most iconic works, including The Persistence of Memory (1931).

Dalí’s gravitational pull would prove immense over the years, and Cadaqués soon became a gathering place for artists including Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and René Magritte. More recently, the village has welcomed the likes of Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Shakira and Sting.

While the once-sleepy inlet is now world-renowned, its commitment to the arts remains strong, with myriad galleries clustered in town alongside museums and scrupulously preserved historical landmarks.

Hawaii

Artists with an affinity for nature have long been bewitched by the lush volcanic mountains and blue waters of the Hawaiian Islands. Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in Honolulu in 1939 on a trip funded by the company now known as Dole. During her nine-week stay, she painted striking lava bridges, misty waterfalls and colourful flora, creating a portfolio of about 20 works. Though she never painted the pineapples the company had asked for, the islands left a lasting impression, and she returned twice more: in 1959 and again in 1982 at 94 years old.

The contemporary artist Julian Schnabel first came to Hawaii to surf in the 1980s, a trip that sparked his Navigation Drawings series. In these works, Schnabel overlays oil compositions onto maps. He has continued this practice across the years, creating a painted chronicle of his adventures in the Aloha State.

The South of France

From the snowcapped spires of the Pyrenees to the glittering coastline of the Mediterranean, the South of France stuns with its colourful landscape. The region’s vineyards, olive groves, lavender fields and exceptional light have all been obsessively painted by generations of artists. Vincent Van Gogh famously decamped to Arles and later convalesced in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence after a series of breakdowns. Both stays were fertile periods of creativity that produced some of his best work.

Beginning in the 1940s, Pablo Picasso spent time in Antibes and Vallauris before settling in Mougins, where he lived and worked until his death in 1973. There, Picasso surrounded himself with a rotating circle of artists including Leonora Carrington, Man Ray and Lee Miller —friendships that fuelled a highly creative environment.

Matisse and Marc Chagall were drawn to the sun-dappled coast of Nice. The region’s rich light and colours shaped Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Orphism. Niki de Saint Phalle lived and worked in the coastal town of Sète, and Etel Adnan’s colourful abstract compositions have been inspired by Mediterranean vistas. The enduring influence of le Midi, as its known, affirms Van Gogh’s declaration: ‘The whole future of art is to be found in the South of France.’