All the world’s a page
Next holiday destination? Leave it up to the masters. By Ute Junker.
If you were trying to capture the French Riviera on canvas, there are three colours you would pile high on your palette. Blue, for that glittering ocean; yellow, for the sun that shines more than 300 days of the year; and green, for the soft carpet of vegetation unfurling over the hills that rise high above the coast.
Those are precisely the hues that Henri Matisse turned to when creating the stained-glass windows for the Chapel of the Rosary in the inland town of Vence, in the C te d’Azur. The chapel is not a large building — it is the interiors, stark in their simplicity, that make it so memorable. The light pouring in through those vividly coloured windows illuminates Christian iconography pared down to its essence, including a “Madonna and Child” depicted in one fluid line.
Matisse’s stripped-back chapel is a vivid demonstration of how living on the French Riviera influenced the work of one of Europe’s greatest artists. There are plenty of other examples if you know where to look. The Riviera has attracted an extraordinary array of talent over the years, from painters such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. To find their traces, you need to venture beyond the bright lights of Cannes and Nice.
“The town of Menton is associated with Robert Louis Stevenson and [New Zealand writers] Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield — [Mansfield] spent the last years of her life here,” says author and broadcaster Lucienne Joy. “Writer William Somerset Maugham had that extraordinary Moorish villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and Saint-Tropez was discovered by Impressionist artist Paul Signac, who was out sailing when he first spotted the town. Lots of artists came down to visit him when he was down here.”
Joy will delve deep into these stories on her Authors and Artists of the South of France tour next May, part of the World Art Tours series presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of NSW members and operated by Renaissance Tours.
“The Russian presence is really interesting,” she says. “[Playwright Anton] Chekhov was there a couple of times; we have lunch at the hotel where he stayed.
“Chekhov had TB [tuberculosis], as did many of the other writers who ended up down here at the time. The climate was considered the best winter climate for TB sufferers.”
Joy’s tour represents an increasingly popular type of cultural itinerary, one which turns the old-school literary tour on its head. Book lovers have long journeyed to visit the homes of their favourite authors, be it Jane Austen in Bath, William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon or William Wordsworth in the Lakes District, a phenomenon lovingly satirised in Larissa Behrendt’s warm-hearted novel, “After Story”.
This new breed of tours flips the script, looking at each destination through the eyes of the creatives it inspired. Guests on Martin Randall Travel’s Iceland’s Story tour, scheduled for August 2025, will examine Iceland’s impact on artist and textile designer William Morris and writer W H Auden. Together with travel companion Louis MacNeice, Auden published a poetry and prose collection called “Letters from Iceland” after their 1936 visit to the land of fire and ice.
In September next year, Australian author Kate Forsyth will lead a tour to sun-drenched Greece, which provided backdrops for the works of authors such as Lawrence Durrell, Haruki Murakami, Maeve Binchy and Forsyth herself. (Her most recent novel, “Psykhe”, is inspired by ancient Greek myth, while an earlier book, “The Crimson Thread”, is set in Nazi-occupied Crete.)
The tour, titled From Ancient Myths to Modern Storytellers and operated by Better Read Literary Tours, includes literary salons held in destinations including Athens, Crete and Hydra, where Australian writer Charmian Clift remembered “listening to the dialogue of donkeys, seeing shadowed wall, rooftop, tile, alley aswarm with huge slinking shapes of cats, like an emanation of the secret soul of the place”.
The well-kept streets of Scandinavia’s biggest cities feel a world away from Hydra’s narrow alleys but here, too, travellers can gain fresh insights by looking through a creative lens, thanks to Anthony Burke’s tour structured around Scandinavia’s masters of modernist architecture.
“The landscape and the climate are so intense, the buildings almost work as a framing device,” says Burke, a professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. “The landscape evokes a sense of wonder, a sense of awe and respect that is evident in the architecture.”
Burke’s Nordic Lights tour, also part of the World Art Tours portfolio and operating next June, travels through Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen to examine how Scandinavia’s groundbreaking modernists responded both to the landscapes and the culture in which they worked.
Take Finnish architect Alvar Aalto who, often in partnership with his wife Aino, brought an organic flair to Scandinavian modernism. He was known for his eclecticism, tackling everything from town halls to bookstores and designing every last detail of his projects.
In Helsinki’s Savoy Restaurant, for instance, he created the chairs, the tables, even the decorative vases (the Savoy vase, now known as the Aalto vase, has become a design classic).
Other notable Aalto projects range from the austere Carrara marble facade of Finlandia Hall, one of Helsinki’s most striking buildings, to the cosy country house Villa Mairea, where grass grows on the sauna roof and the entrance is framed by a colonnade of unstripped saplings, echoing the classic Finnish birch forest.
Looking for artistic inspiration closer to home? In New South Wales’ Shoalhaven region, a visit to painter Arthur Boyd’s 1,000-hectare property, Bundanon, is a surprisingly multi-layered experience. While the onsite museum and the Homestead, containing Boyd’s studio, are the big draws, Bundanon’s Emily McTaggart says visitors who love Boyd’s evocative landscapes are advised to explore the estate fully.
“Experiencing the landscape is equally as important as experiencing his studio or seeing his works on the wall,” she says. “For Boyd, the landscape is a living being in his practice, and this 1,000 hectares is his huge legacy in protecting the environment.”
Visitors can follow several trails through the bush, including one that leads to the beach where Boyd painted many of his famous Shoalhaven paintings. For those who want to linger even longer, weekend stays are available several times a year.
Even the bustling streets of Melbourne offer a masterclass in creativity for those who know what they are seeing. The city’s literary history is surprisingly long: contemporary crime writers such as Peter Temple (author of the Jack Irish books) and Kerry Greenwood (who created the Phryne Fisher series) are part of a tradition dating all the way back to 1886.
That is when Fergus Hume’s “Mystery of a Hansom Cab” became an international bestseller thanks to its intriguing plot and its depictions of boomtown Melbourne, from the refined lifestyles of the rich to the slums of Little Bourke Street.
On the City of Literature tour led by Walking Tours of Melbourne’s Meyer Eidelson, guests explore a variety of destinations: some ripped straight out of the pages of novels, others intimately linked to the real lives of the authors. They range from the hushed atmosphere inside the green-domed State Library, where writers including Helen Garner have toiled (she wrote her novel “Monkey Grip” there) to a more mouthwatering stop: The Hotel Windsor, where the coolly capable, black-bobbed Phryne Fisher often takes afternoon tea.
This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our thirteenth edition, Page 128 of Winning Magazine with the headline: “All the world’s a page”. Subscribe to Winning Magazine today.
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