Artwriting' can be thought of as writing 'about' art in the broadest senses, both thematic and spatial, including a website or monograph on an artist, an article or blog, a text in philosophical aesthetics, texts by artists, art that employs written or aural language, or a label in a museum. We will consider these practical and theoretical practices in European and North American contexts from c. 1750 to the present. We will discuss the relationships between and mutual definition of text and image, the institutional contexts of artwriting, and the import of geographical locale and cultural assumptions to the types of imagery and text produced. We will focus on published and unpublished travel narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries as artwriting, specifically as imagetexts (Mitchell) and iconotexts (Louvel). We will use Arctic voyages from the Anglosphere and Nordic countries as the anchor for comparative studies of illustrated travel literature. We will discuss the complex infrastructural media of voyages on land, sea, and in the air (often together), oral and written accounts (some Indigenous, others Western, often in their intersections), mapmaking, publishing protocols, tourism, early guidebooks, and developments in reproductive media technologies — from wood engraving to chromolithography to photography — using period documents at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Toronto Public Library. Theoretical perspectives from media theory, eco-critical art history, and analyses of empire, imperialism, and colonialism will be examined in the context of illustrated travel publications.