ABSTRACT
The depiction of Africa proved problematic for explorers who were very rarely trained as artists. They had, however, been infl uenced by contemporary European visual culture, which was used as a template for documenting African scenes. In this chapter, a closer examination will be undertaken of the content of travellers’ visual collections in order to understand how contemporary visual culture affected their documentation. Whilst an indepth analysis of the infl uence of Western art traditions on travellers’ pictures is beyond the scope of this study, the principal sources of inspiration and infl uence will be outlined.
