'Travels on Paper' at The Clark worth the trip

The premise of "Travels on Paper" is a curatorial slight. From the extensive holdings of works on paper at the Clark, the curators have chosen an unpretentious group about travel. Or about art made in places far from home. Or about art made depicting places far from home. Or maybe just art with exotic themes, whatever exotic might mean to them, and to us.

Defining travel, and confirming any traveling artist's outsider status, is what makes all these objects relevant and complicated. What, and why, is the artist making art about places they know little about except what they so newly see?

Look at the watercolors by John La Farge, an American who is best known to me as an opalescent stained glass competitor to Louis Comfort Tiffany in the 1880s. LaFarge had reasonable pretensions beyond the decorative arts, and these are some of around 200 studies he made to detail his observations on a trip to Hawaii and the South Seas. Though a bit stiff, they have a fresh feeling of light, and a genuine sense of looking at subjects utterly new to him. (He was dismayed by how the cultures he found were already altered by outside influences.)

Another striving and important American at the same time was Thomas Moran, a Hudson River School painter who went West to make some famous works in Yellowstone in 1871. Here we have an energetic, atmospheric, and yet spare etching based on a trip a decade later to Veracruz. It's quite compelling with what it shows and what it withholds, but it's less immediate than the La Farge paintings — it was etched a year later after, presumably at his studio.

Two Scottish photographers from the early days of the medium are featured. John Murray took a range of views of India around 1860, among the earliest large views from that country, and here are not only prints but also a paper negative, the very...