Travelling in a Palimpsest

Like all travellers in Spain, Albert Edelfelt and the other Finnish nineteenth-century painters worshipped at the Prado, admired Flamenco dance, beautiful women, bullfights, and cypsies. Yearning for the authenticity of a distant and exotic past, yet following the usual tourist paths and admiring the common sights, they voyaged in a landscape partly mythical and partly real. Their imagining, experiencing and remembering Spain in snapshot paintings, souvenirs d'Espagne, is the theme of this book.