Gimson made his first trip abroad in 1887. He travelled to Italy with Ernest Barnsley in January to study architecture having prepared by reading John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture and other travel books and by learning some basic Italian phrases. Some of the highlights of their trip were Genoa (
‘the great walls along the shore and the seven forts crowning the hill add a great deal to its beauty’)
; Perugia (‘
It is by far the loveliest place we have seen yet. It is built on the top of a high hill, like Siena, and can boast of streets as narrow and as steep, and of people more picturesque’); Florence
(‘We had breakfast at eight and then spent the time till lunch in gazing at Giotto’s tower from every point of view in tense excitement at its loveliness and in dreaming in the Baptistry in an ecstasy of delight’). They enjoyed Venice but deplored the efforts of restorers:
‘St Mark’s is one of the few things that it is almost impossible to overpraise but the restorers are at work, scraping, cleaning and renewing and making it as much like a restaurant as possible.’
Gimson sketched buildings, produced measured drawings of details such as Pisano’s fountain at Perugia and a bronze candlestick in a church at Genoa, and copied patterns from metalwork, textiles, inlaid marble and stonework. They enjoyed most of what Gimson described as ‘the inconveniences and vulgarities’ of Italian life including sharing a bottle of local wine with the monks at St Peter’s, Perugia. By late June the two men were returning home through France stopping at Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Chartres, and Bayeux among other places on the way and arriving back in London in August 1887.
