The World's Most Underrated Painting Destinations
Beyond Venice and Provence — the cities, coastlines, and hidden corners of the world that reward the painter with a sketchbook and the traveler with eyes wide open
The Problem with the Obvious Destinations
Every watercolor retreat brochure in existence features the same six places. Tuscany, its rolling hills rendered in warm Burnt Sienna and New Gamboge. Santorini, its whitewashed domes against Phthalo Blue sky. Paris, always Paris, where the light on the Seine is reliably photogenic and the cafés reliably open. Provence, in lavender season, looking exactly like every Provence painting ever sold in a gallery that also sells prints.
These are magnificent places. The paintings they inspire are often beautiful. And therein lies the problem, which any painter who has set up an easel in Vernazza or Positano has discovered: the view is so familiar, so thoroughly processed by the pictorial tradition, that your eye goes immediately to the already-seen composition rather than to the specific, unrepeated, particular quality of light and form that makes a place worth painting. The tourist looks through you to the postcard view you are in the way of. The resulting painting, however technically competent, carries the slight unreality of a painting made of a painting.
The destinations in this article are different. Some are genuinely unknown to tourist traffic. Some are famous for entirely other reasons and have simply been overlooked by the painting tradition. Some are known to painters but discussed only in whispers among those who have been. All of them share a specific quality that the obvious destinations have had photographed out of them: genuine visual surprise.
Pack the paints. Leave the sketchbook guide at home. The following places will make their own demands, and meeting them is where the interesting work begins.
1. Skagen, Denmark
The tip of the world, where two seas argue
At the northernmost point of the Jutland peninsula, the North Sea and the Kattegat meet in a visible, physical collision. You can stand at Grenen — the very tip, a sandbar that extends into the water like a geographical footnote — and watch two different seas arrive from opposite directions and argue about whose water this is. The waves actually run toward each other. Swimming is prohibited because the currents could carry you to Norway or Scotland with equal indifference.
The light here is unlike any other coastal light in Europe. One Skagen painter said, "Where two seas meet, the light can't help but be the bluest in creation." A translucent light that merged the sea and the sky — especially during the evening "blue hour." The reason is physics: the water from two seas reflects light at slightly different angles simultaneously, and the low latitude means the light arrives horizontally for much of the day, raking across the white sand dunes with a specificity that painters have been trying to capture since the 1870s.
Beginning in the 1870s an artists' colony that attracted international attention, even beyond Denmark's borders, developed in the little fishing village of Skagen, where two seas meet at the north-eastern tip of the country. The special quality of the light, the light-coloured and extensive sandy beach and the high dunes along a coast seen as remarkably pristine as well as the hard life of the people there fascinated Danish artists and also painters from Norway, Sweden and Germany.
The painters who came were serious ones. P.S. Krøyer — the most celebrated — captured Skagen's blue summer evenings in works that remain the defining images of Scandinavian Impressionism. Anna and Michael Ancher, who married and never left, built their studio here; it still stands as a museum, the paintings still on the walls, the brushes and paint boxes arranged as though the owners have just stepped out for the light.
The best-kept secret: The artists decorated the dining room of Brøndums Hotel, and in 1946, the room was transferred to the Skagen Museum opposite the hotel. The dining room contained 81 pieces of art, including portraits of the artists in the Skagen Colony. You can eat dinner in a reconstruction of this room — surrounded by the actual painted panels that the colony members decorated — at a hotel that has been feeding artists since the 1870s. This is not a themed restaurant. It is a genuine document of a creative community that shaped Northern European painting.
What to paint: The dune landscapes in evening light. The fishing harbor at dawn, when the morning blue is at its most pure. The buried church at Skagen — a medieval structure half-swallowed by a dune, only its tower remaining above the sand — which has been painted by every serious artist who came here and which still has not been exhausted as a subject.
Practical note: For a blend of pleasant weather and fewer crowds, late spring (May to early June) or early autumn (September to early October) are ideal. During these times, the light is still beautiful, most attractions are open, and you can enjoy the natural beauty and artistic heritage without the peak summer rush.
Pop culture footnote: The Danish television series Seaside Hotel (Badehotellet), which ran for nine seasons and became the country's most-watched domestic drama, is set at a Skagen-like coastal resort in the golden age of the painters' colony. The show's visual style — warm evening light, long summer days, the specific turquoise of the Kattegat — is essentially an eight-season argument for coming here with a paintbrush.
2. Valleta, Malta
The smallest capital in the EU, built entirely by knights
Malta is one of the most painted places in the Mediterranean and one of the least talked about in watercolor circles. This is a strange oversight. The island sits at roughly 36 degrees north — the same latitude as Tunis and Crete — which gives it a light of extraordinary intensity and specificity. The local limestone, called globigerina, is a warm honey-gold in daylight and shifts to deep amber in late afternoon, making every building in Valletta a ready-made study in warm-against-warm color relationships that challenge and reward in equal measure.
Most of the city was built by Grand Master Jean de Valette of the Knights of St John. Building began in the 1560s and it has a predominantly Baroque feel to it. That said, it has a formidable wall all around it and represented a very serious obstacle to any would-be invader. The Knights were not modest builders: the streets of Valletta rise steeply from the harbor through a sequence of Baroque churches, palaces, and fortifications that create, in the early morning light, a progression of warm stone planes and deep purple shadows that Sargent would have set up his portable stool in front of without a second's hesitation.
The Italian artists Caravaggio and Mattia Preti spent several years in Malta, the latter's most important paintings embellishing many of Malta's churches. Caravaggio arrived in 1607 as a fugitive — he had killed a man in Rome in a brawl and needed the protection of the Knights of St John, who made him a member of the Order in exchange for paintings. His Beheading of St John the Baptist in St John's Co-Cathedral is the largest painting he ever made and the only one he ever signed — in the blood pooling beneath the Baptist's neck. This is not a cheerful piece of trivia, but it is the kind of thing that makes standing in a church feel like something other than tourism.
The best-kept secret: The upper tier of the Barrakka Gardens, which most visitors walk through on the way to the famous view of the Grand Harbour, contains a smaller loggia that looks directly over the fortifications toward Vittoriosa at a low enough angle that the full depth of the harbor walls reads as a watercolor subject of extraordinary complexity — warm stone, deep shadow, and Mediterranean blue in exactly the ratio that makes the Ultramarine-Burnt Sienna-reserved white formula sing.
What to paint: The characteristic Maltese balconies — painted wood, brilliant green or deep red, projecting from limestone facades — are the subject that draws almost every painter to Valletta specifically. The relationship between the warm stone, the colored wood, and the strong shadow beneath each balcony is a complete tutorial in warm-cool contrast within a confined subject area. The view across the Grand Harbour from the Barrakka at dusk, when the fortifications turn from gold to amber and the water goes deep violet-blue, is the sunset painting that Santorini wishes it could be.
The film connection: The Valletta location has served as stand-in for a remarkable number of historical periods in international cinema — from Game of Thrones' early King's Landing sequences to Gladiator II and multiple Bond productions. The reason is the same reason it rewards painters: the architecture is genuinely historic, genuinely Mediterranean, and genuinely Baroque without being sanitized or reconstructed. You are painting real stones.
3. Luang Prabang, Laos
A UNESCO city at the confluence of two rivers, where the monks leave before dawn
Every morning at approximately 5:30am, before the sun has properly arrived, the monks of Luang Prabang's thirty-odd Buddhist temples file through the streets in long lines of saffron robes to receive alms from the town's residents. This is the tak bat — the giving of sticky rice, banana, and sweet cakes from townspeople kneeling on the pavement — and it has occurred here every morning for centuries. The light at this hour, filtering through monsoon-season mist or crisp dry-season air, strikes the orange robes at an angle that produces some of the most extraordinary color temperature effects available anywhere in Southeast Asia.
Luang Prabang sits at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers in northern Laos. The surrounding mountains — perpetually blue-green, their lower slopes terraced in rice — create a bowl of air that holds morning mist in specific ways that make the light soft and directional simultaneously. The French colonial architecture that lines the main peninsula, combined with the gilded wooden temple structures (sim) and the French baguette sellers who set up at dawn alongside the morning market, creates a visual culture of such specific and unrepeatable character that every painter who has been here reports the same experience: the sketchbook fills too fast and the days are too short.
The best-kept secret: The Mekong at sunset, viewed from the steps of Wat Xieng Thong on the tip of the peninsula, produces a river-light of exceptional warmth and complexity. The combination of wide, slow brown water, the specific quality of the tropical atmosphere filtering the low sun, and the silhouettes of the limestone mountains across the river creates a palette that is essentially Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, and Prussian Blue — Homer's Caribbean palette, repurposed for the Mekong Delta — at their most eloquent.
The Ock Pop Tok Living Crafts Centre, set in a garden on the Mekong's edge, offers classes in traditional Lao weaving and natural dyeing using materials that painters should spend time looking at very carefully: the mordant-dyed silks use natural colorants including indigo, turmeric, and tannin-based browns that are essentially the same pigment family as the historical watercolor palette. The connection between textile color and painting color — both derived from the same natural world — is made physically present in a way that no art theory text replicates.
What to paint: The tak bat processions, if you have the patience and the sensitivity to observe without intruding — a significant ethical consideration that requires sitting far back and working quickly in the pre-dawn light. The temple interiors, where gold stencil work on dark red lacquer creates the most demanding color note imaginable — how do you mix the light on gold? Quinacridone Gold (PO49) over a dark ground glaze is the nearest approximation, and the exercise of trying teaches you more about warm-cool contrast than a week of theory.
Practical note: Luang Prabang is best visited October through February — the dry season, when the air is clear, the light is precise, and the rivers are lower and more vividly colored. The rainy season produces spectacular mist effects but also unreliable painting conditions.
4. Oaxaca, Mexico
Where Zapotec color meets Spanish Baroque and the light has no opinion about any of it
Oaxaca occupies a highland valley at 1,550 meters in southern Mexico, which gives it a light quality distinct from both the coastal light of the Pacific and the lowland tropics: clear, high-altitude, slightly cool in the morning and intensely warm in the afternoon, with a transparent quality that makes shadows crisp and color relationships precise. The local building tradition uses adobe rendered in a specific range of warm earth colors — terracotta, warm sand, the particular dusty rose of volcanic rock — punctuated by the brilliant primary-secondary colors of painted wooden doorways, tiled fountains, and the extraordinary murals that cover public walls throughout the city center.
This is also, importantly, the city whose markets and street life have been attracting painters since before the tourist infrastructure arrived. Diego Rivera came here. Francisco Toledo — arguably the greatest Mexican artist of the late 20th century — was born here and spent his career in dialogue with the city's indigenous Zapotec visual culture. The Centro Fotográfico Álvarez Bravo, named after the great Mexican photographer, hosts rotating exhibitions of contemporary Mexican photography that are as visually rich as anything in the city's museums.
The best-kept secret: The weekly Saturday market at Tlacolula de Matamoros, about 30 kilometers outside Oaxaca in the Tlacolula Valley, is one of the great open-air markets of the Western hemisphere — a genuine tianguis (indigenous market) at which Zapotec-speaking vendors from the surrounding valleys sell textiles, food, ceramics, and livestock in a visual environment of such color density that the palette needs to be abandoned and rebuilt from scratch. The colors here are not the colors in any painting tutorial. They are the colors of mole negro (twelve chili varieties, chocolate, and time), chapulines (toasted grasshoppers eaten with lime and chili), hand-dyed woolen textiles in cochineal red and indigo blue, and the specific turquoise of Oaxacan ceramic glazes. None of these are Cerulean Blue and Cadmium Red.
The cochineal connection deserves a specific note: the brilliant carmine red derived from the cochineal insect — the same colorant that made 16th-century Spanish dyeing an international industry — was historically used in European watercolor as Carmine or Indian Red. Winslow Homer's fugitive reds, discussed in the conservation article of this series, were cochineal-based. In Tlacolula's market, you can buy raw cochineal from vendors who still cultivate the insect on nopal cactus, and in Oaxaca's craft workshops you can watch the dyeing process. The pigment that faded out of Homer's paintings is still alive in the valley of its origin.
What to paint: The zócalo (central square) at Sunday evening, when the brass band plays and the town promenades in a ritual unchanged since the colonial period. The market stalls at Tlacolula. The ruins of Monte Albán at dawn, when the pre-Columbian pyramid complex catches first light in a way that makes the distinction between architecture and landscape irrelevant. The mezcal distilleries in the villages outside town, where the agave plants growing in rows create a compositional subject of unexpected formal elegance.
Pop culture moment: The 2017 Pixar film Coco — which features the Land of the Dead as a visual explosion of Oaxacan color, architecture, and Día de Muertos imagery — sent approximately the entire world to look at pictures of Oaxaca simultaneously. The city's residents received this with a mixture of gratitude and bracing for the tourist consequences. The film's color palette was specifically developed by Pixar's art team through research visits to Oaxaca and is, among other things, an argument that the city's visual culture is so strong it could anchor the entire visual world of a major animated feature without strain.
5. The Faroe Islands
Eighteen volcanic islands where the weather changes every twenty minutes and the light is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere
The Faroe Islands sit in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway — a collection of eighteen volcanic islands of steep green cliffs, plunging sea-cliffs, and villages of turf-roofed houses that look as though they were designed by someone who had seen Tolkien's Shire and thought: yes, but wetter. The population is approximately 55,000. The number of tourists arriving annually has tripled in the last decade, driven in significant part by the islands' appearance as a filming location in Nordic noir television series and, more recently, by photographers who discovered that the islands look, in the right light, like a landscape that should not exist on this planet.
The light here is, to put it technically, insane. The North Atlantic weather produces conditions in which full overcast, partial cloud-break, low horizontal light, and moving fog can occur within the same thirty-minute painting session. This is not convenient. It is, however, exactly the atmospheric challenge that produces the most interesting watercolor work — the painter who has learned to respond to changing light rather than waiting for stable conditions finds the Faroese weather a creative partner rather than an obstacle.
The color palette the islands demand is unlike any other watercolor destination. The greens are not Mediterranean olive or English summer green — they are saturated, vivid, almost violent, like Viridian that has been given permission to be itself without apology. The cliffs are dark basalt — a blue-gray that needs Indanthrone Blue and Raw Umber rather than any of the more polite blue-gray mixtures. The sky, when it opens, is the specific cold blue of Phthalo Blue at very high dilution, very close to nothing, occupying a register between color and light that is genuinely difficult to achieve on paper without overworking.
The best-kept secret: The village of Gásadalur, on the island of Vágar, sits at the edge of a cliff above a waterfall that drops directly into the sea. Until 2004, the village was accessible only by a mountain path requiring a two-hour walk. A tunnel built in that year connected it to the rest of Vágar. The village has approximately a dozen inhabitants and the single most paintable view in the North Atlantic — a compositional gift that the Faroese seem to accept with the equanimity of people who have always known they live somewhere extraordinary. Getting there by ferry from Tórshavn and then driving through the tunnel is entirely manageable. Setting up a watercolor block at the cliff edge is an experience that does not have a close second.
What to paint: The turf-roofed houses — a building tradition in which the roof is literally a planted sod, growing grass and wildflowers — in combination with the painted wooden facades in the traditional Faroese colors (red, black, white, or the specific blue-green called hvítgrøn) create subjects of unusual formal interest. The sea-cliffs at their full height are too vast for a single sketchbook page but magnificent in studies of their specific color relationships. The puffin colonies on the Vestmanna sea cliffs — accessible by boat tour — are a painting subject that manages to be simultaneously spectacular and slightly ridiculous, which is an unusual combination.
The cultural footnote: The Faroese artist Sámal Joensen-Mikines, born in 1906 and trained in Copenhagen under the influence of Edvard Munch, is arguably the greatest painter the islands have produced. His dark, expressionist canvases of whale drives, fishing villages, and island interiors are almost unknown outside Scandinavia. The Listasavn Føroya (National Gallery) in Tórshavn holds the most comprehensive collection of his work, and seeing it before heading out to paint the same landscape is the most direct possible argument for the principle that knowing a place's pictorial tradition changes how you look at it.
6. Kyoto In November
Not an underrated destination — an underrated month in a destination most painters visit at the wrong time
Every artist interested in Japan goes to Kyoto. They go in March for the cherry blossoms or in April for the late spring light, fighting through crowds of comparable artistic aspiration for a view of Kinkaku-ji that has been painted, photographed, and illustrated into the status of a visual cliché so powerful that it is nearly impossible to see the actual building.
November is different. The koyo — autumn foliage season — peaks in Kyoto in mid-to-late November, and it produces a palette that makes the spring cherry blossom look timid. The maples go from green through every gradation of yellow-orange-red in the space of about three weeks. The momiji (Japanese maple) specifically goes a red so vivid that Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255) barely begins to describe it. Against the dark, aged cedar of temple structures and the cool blue-gray of stone lanterns, the combination produces color temperature contrasts of exceptional force.
The light in November is also specifically favorable for the painter. The sun is lower in the sky than in spring or summer, arriving at angles that rake across the stone garden surfaces and wooden temple verandas with the same horizontal quality that Sargent sought on his Venice watercolor trips. The shadows in a Kyoto November garden, early morning, are long and precise and cool against the warm leaf color above them — exactly the warm-cool contrast that makes shadow passages glow.
The best-kept secret: The northern ward of Kurama, accessible by the Eizan Electric Railway from Demachiyanagi in about forty-five minutes, receives the autumn foliage slightly later than central Kyoto and sees a fraction of the visitors. The approach to Kurama-dera temple through mountain cedar forest, with the autumn maples breaking through the dark canopy, is the most consistently surprising painting subject the city's immediate surroundings offer. The village of Kibune, a twenty-minute walk over the mountain from Kurama, sits above a river and offers traditional kaiseki dining on platforms built over the water — directly above one of the most beautiful subjects for plein air watercolor in Japan.
The paint supply note of significance: Kyoto is home to Pigment Kyoto on Shijo-dori — a remarkable art supply shop that stocks traditional Japanese pigments (nihonga) alongside the full range of Western materials. For painters interested in the intersection of Japanese and Western watercolor traditions, this shop is a pilgrimage destination in its own right. They stock genuine mineral pigments in colors that have no Western equivalent — the azurite blue called gunjo, the malachite green called rokusho — that can be incorporated into watercolor work in ways that produce color quality impossible from any tube.
What to paint: The rock gardens of Ryoan-ji and Daisen-in in morning light, when the raked gravel catches low side-light and the shadow patterns on the stones read as a complete composition in three values. The Philosopher's Path (Tetsugaku no Michi) in late November, when the canal is dark and the last maple leaves are reflected in it against a pale sky. The painted screen walls (fusuma) visible through open temple doors — the only circumstance in which the interior of a Japanese temple feels paintable rather than merely viewable.
7. Essaouira, Morocco
The blue city that isn't Chefchaouen — and is better for it
Chefchaouen, the famous blue city in Morocco's Rif Mountains, has been so thoroughly Instagrammed that visiting it now involves negotiating with other photographers for access to the particular blue alley that everyone needs a photograph of. The paintings that result, however accomplished, carry the same pre-seen quality as Santorini at sunset.
Essaouira, on Morocco's Atlantic coast, is not Chefchaouen. Its walls are white — the white of sea salt and Atlantic wind — and its shutters and doors are the specific faded blue-green of painted wood that has spent decades in salt air: a blue quite different from Chefchaouen's vivid indigo, cooler, grayer, more complex, entirely its own. The combination of white walls, faded blue-green woodwork, and the particular silvery-cool light of the Atlantic coast (cooler than the Mediterranean light of Marrakech, more overcast, more atmospheric in the watercolor sense) produces a palette of unusual restraint and subtlety.
The city has a significant artistic history. Orson Welles filmed part of his Othello here in 1952 — the opening funeral procession scenes, with their spectacular fortification backdrop. Jimi Hendrix visited in 1969, was briefly tempted to buy a house, and instead gave the city's hippie community an endorsement that lingered for decades. The Wind Festival (Festival des Alizés) each spring, celebrating the trade winds that make the city's coast one of the best windsurfing locations in the world, fills the medina with music, color, and the specific energy of a North African city that is genuinely having a good time.
The best-kept secret: The skala du port — the sea bastion that extends into the Atlantic from the south end of the medina — offers a view back to the city walls from the sea that no tourist map marks as a painting spot, because the path out to it is unmarked and slightly precarious. The view of the ramparts from the water, with the Atlantic in the foreground and the white city above the walls, is among the most classically paintable views in North Africa, and on any given weekday morning you will likely have it entirely to yourself.
What to paint: The thuya wood craftsmen of the medina — Essaouira's craftspeople specialize in the distinctive root-burl wood of the local thuya tree, producing furniture, marquetry, and boxes of exceptional quality. The workshops, open to the street, offer studies of skilled hands at work in rooms of warm wood shavings and saw dust and slanted light that are the subject Vermeer would have painted if he'd been in Morocco. The harbor at dawn, when the blue fishing boats are being loaded by orange-jacketed workers against a pale Atlantic sky. The ramparts at sunset, when the swallows that nest in the fortifications emerge in their thousands against the cooling sky.
8. Valleta to Gozo — The Ferry Crossing Worth Taking
A twenty-five-minute boat ride that changes the palette entirely
Gozo, Malta's smaller northern island, is reached by a twenty-five-minute ferry crossing from Ċirkewwa on Malta's northern tip. The crossing itself is worth painting — the specific blue of the Maltese channel, the limestone cliffs of Gozo approaching, the small ferries passing in either direction. But the island, once reached, offers a completely different visual register from Valletta's Baroque urbanity.
The interior of Gozo is agricultural in a way that Malta's dense population prevents — terraced fields of red Maltese soil, stone walls built without mortar (yet somehow standing for centuries), and the ruins of the Ggantija temples, older than Stonehenge and older than the Egyptian pyramids, sitting in a field near the village of Xagħra with minimal interpretation and no queue. The specific red of Gozitan soil — a vivid, warm terracotta produced by the iron-rich globigerina limestone's dissolution — is unlike any soil color elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and the combination of this red earth, the warm golden stone walls, and the intense blue of the sky above produces a palette that is essentially Indian Red, Burnt Sienna, Cobalt Blue, and bare paper — a palette of four elements and no redundancy.
The best-kept secret: The Azure Window, the famous natural limestone arch that appeared in the pilot episode of Game of Thrones, collapsed into the sea during a storm in 2017. This is mentioned not as a tragedy but as a reminder that the natural world's most paintable elements are also its most temporary. What replaced the Azure Window as Gozo's most extraordinary natural subject is the Inland Sea at Dwejra — a saltwater lagoon connected to the open sea by a narrow cave tunnel, through which small wooden luzzu boats pass on excursions. The light inside the cave tunnel, and the way the open sea beyond it reads as a luminous blue rectangle against the dark rock interior, is a painting subject of genuine, unmapped originality.
The Painter's Manifesto for Underrated Places
There is a principle underlying every destination in this list, and it is worth naming directly before the last boarding call.
The best painting destinations are not the most beautiful places in the world. Beauty, in the conventional travel-magazine sense, is a trap — places that are unambiguously, visually spectacular tend to produce paintings that say "I was here" rather than paintings that say something interesting. The best painting destinations are places where the light, the architecture, the color relationships, and the human activity combine in ways that are simultaneously surprising and coherent: surprising enough to defeat habit and familiarity, coherent enough to reward sustained looking.
The Faroes are not conventionally beautiful. They are extreme and demanding and change their mind about what they look like every twenty minutes. Oaxaca is not elegant. It is exuberant and dense and slightly overwhelming. Luang Prabang is peaceful in a way that can be mistaken for dullness until the morning light hits the monastery walls and you understand that you have been wrong about what you were looking at.
All of them require the same thing. Not a more sophisticated palette, not a better brush, not a larger sketchbook. Simply the willingness to see what is actually there rather than what you expected. This is, in the end, what painting anywhere requires. The underrated destinations just make the lesson slightly easier to learn, because they have not already taught it to a thousand painters before you.
The sketchbook is blank. The water is clear. The boat leaves at six.
A note on art supplies abroad: Most of the destinations in this article have limited access to professional-grade watercolor materials. Valletta and Kyoto are exceptions — Kyoto's Pigment Kyoto is genuinely world-class, and Malta has a small but well-stocked art supply community in Valletta's Republic Street. For all other destinations, bring everything you need, with backup. The Faroese will look at your Kolinsky sable with interest and without comprehension. Pack accordingly.