Centre for the Study of Art & Travel
The Centre for the study of Art and Travel (CART) supports research into the National Maritime Museum’s extensive collections relating to this area, including prints, drawings, oils, and photographic collections.
More widely the Centre aims to provides a forum for scholarly exchange and engagement with the subject across a broad spectrum of national and international institutions. Whilst the main focus of the Centre is to deepen academic research into the subject, it also seeks to address a wider public audience in promoting the importance of the subject area and access to the relevant collections of the Museum.
Origins of the Centre
The Centre was launched at the start of the State of the Art conference, 18-20 July 2007. 
In advance of this, a series of six themed workshops was held at various locations in the UK and USA during 2006-07, generously funded by a Research Networks and Workshops grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Landscape and Environment Programme.
The focus of the workshops was to investigate art and travel as historical and ongoing interlinked cultural practices. Each workshop approached the overall subject via a specific theme or issue: investigating the archive, identity, narrative, science, landscape and empire. This programme of workshops facilitated systematic and co-ordinated research into the subject, with the aim of identifying the intellectual agenda and practical means of establishing the Centre.
What's new?
We programmed an exciting new annual lecture series, which focused on new perspectives on Art and Travel in the Mediterranean, 1600-1900 in 2009-10. The 2009-10 lecture series was generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre.
Two CART AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral students, Charlotte Mullins and Geoff Snell, will take forward research into the Museum's rich art and travel collections. Charlotte is working on her study of The World on a Plate: the Impact of Photography on Travel Imagery and its Dissemination in Britain, 1839–88; and Geoff is working on The Visual Imagery of the Thames c.1680–1850.
The summer of 2009 marked the beginning a new project by the curatorial team to digitize and publish online a unique series of sketchbooks made by serving Royal Navy officers during the 18th and 19th centuries. With the help of new research detailing the people and places depicted, the project will enable the Museum’s worldwide audience to virtually ‘leaf through’ the sketchbooks, page by page, following the artists as they travelled the globe.
Finally, Jenny Gaschke, Curator of Fine Art worked on a new book, Edward Lear: Egyptian Sketches, which was published in 2009. The NMM holds a small but exquisite collection of watercolours by the popular nonsense poet and landscape painter. Throughout his life Lear travelled extensively in Europe, the Middle East and India and became famous for views which have fittingly been described as poetical topography. The book is aimed equally at a popular and academic audience, exploring Victorian travel in Egypt through Lear's watercolours and extracts from his diary.
Contact: research@rmg.co.uk