From the 1490s to the 1830s, exploration and colonization drastically changed the way Europeans saw the world beyond the borders of Europe. Early pictures from faraway peoples and places were often based on second or third-hand accounts, with legends and fantasies thrown in.
Standards of accuracy gradually improved as travel increased and one traveler's statement could be checked by another's. But even the most objective traveler interpreted what he saw in the light of what he wanted to see or believed he knew about what he was seeing. And the most accurate traveler's account might be distorted by an artist who had to draw something he had never seen on the basis of a written description.
The pictures in this exhibition showed some of the ways that artists interpreted the world beyond Europe and European eyes, and some of the uses that Europeans made of non-European art and culture.