Lynne Johnson Travel Award Reflection by Caroline Helmer (’26)

The Lynne Johnson Travel Award is a fund awarded to Art History majors and minors to support travel to view art in person.

This past summer, the Wake Forest Art Department is happy to fund Caroline Helmer, an art history major, to travel to Madrid and Seville to conduct onsite research for her honor thesis on looting and restitution of art looted during the Napoleonic Wars.

“It enabled me to see Spanish golden age art in person, art that has since been restored, as well as look at archival documents,” she said.

During her travel, she was able to learn more about painting techniques due to seeing brushwork in person as well as about the collection history, how the placement of certain artworks influenced other artists to create.

By examining artworks in person, she discovered cases of looted and returned pieces that were not documented online as looted or returned, allowing her to add examples to her thesis.