What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over

I returned to London from Barbados to find that the city had stubbornly refused to change.

The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. Pascal, Pensées, 136

Drawing brutally shows up our previous blindness to the true appearance of things.

Ruskin was distressed by how seldom people noticed details. He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who prided themselves on covering Europe in a week by train (a service first offered by Thomas Cook in 1862): ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There

In explaining his love of drawing (it was rare for him to travel anywhere without sketching something), Ruskin once remarked that it arose from a desire, ‘not for reputation, nor for the good of others, nor for my own advantage, but from a sort of instinct like that of eating or drinking’. What unites the three activities is that they all involve

If drawing had value even when it was practised by people with no talent, it was for Ruskin because drawing could teach us to see: to notice rather than to look. In the process of re-creating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep

Van Gogh was to remain in Arles until May 1889, fifteen months during which he produced approximately 200 paintings, 100 drawings and 200 letters – a period generally agreed to have been his greatest. The earliest works show Arles lying under snow, the sky a limpid blue, the earth a frozen pink. Five weeks after Van Gogh arrived, spring came and he

And lastly, that the most effective way of pursuing this conscious understanding is by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, through writing or drawing them, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.