This enduring story has inspired painters, composers and choreographers.
And then there were the Japanese, whose ukiyo-e woodblock prints had inspired painters from Manet to Degas.
WHY IT'S HOT: The Chinese city's willow-fringed West Lake and terraced tea plantations have long inspired painters, poets and travelers.
Here is how he wanted to look to the voters (and to artists, for the pose also inspired painters and printmakers that campaign season).
Its high dunes and wide stretches of clean white sand have inspired painters and writers, and have fed real estate values of up to $20 million for the mansions that face it.
Sightseeing The main attraction in Marrakesh is the landscape, an oasis that has inspired painters from Pierre Loti to Winston Churchill: sensuous reddish-ocher ramparts, the palm and olive groves, and snowcapped Atlas Mountains shimmering in the desert sun.
Anyone doubting her has only to take a visual tour of the county, starting with the green hills and moody low skyline that inspired the painter John Constable: some of his best-known landscapes depict areas of Essex.
There is nothing slapdash in the Euston Road-inspired painter's exploration of the material world and its expression in paint.
He was not as censorious as the poets Lucan and Sextus Propertius, instead laying out the ingredients for a tragic love story that inspired countless painters, playwrights, poets and other artists, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Cecil B. DeMille.
But the world which generally speaking inspired these painters - and they were not supposed to paint what did not engage them - tended to be lower-to-middle-class, not high society.
