periplum, not as land looks on a map but as sea bord seen by men sailing. Ezra Pound, Canto LIX We went to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey . What did I think of it? I agree with what translator Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books and I recommend reading his essay . Emily Wilson's scathing LRB review was entertaining but had me wincing from that second paragraph, where the…
Phoenix rising by the sun in the Aberdeen Bestiary Source: University of Notre Dame It has been intensely hot again this week and I was listening on the news this morning to reports of fires in the Midlands. It made me think of these lines from ' The Phoenix ', a 10th century Old English poem in the Exeter Book which expands upon an older Latin text. When the gem of the skies in a summer season,…
In the late 1930s comparisons were often made between new art and ancient landscapes. In British Art: Ancient Landscapes Sam Smiles cites an essay by John Piper which refers to the work of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, who 'has landed us back in the stomach of pre-history' and Paul Nash, who 'leaves us with the bare sea-washed bones of it.' A Barbara Hepworth catalogue compared her work to menhirs…
Utagawa Hiroshige, Musashi Plain, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji , 1852 I have been reading A Tale Unasked , Penguin's new Meredith McKinney translation of Lady Nijō's Towazugatari , a court and travel diary completed around 1307. After her expulsion from the palace she became an itinerant nun, travelling to famous shrines and checking out utamakura on the way. I have discussed…
Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple , 1834 Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and…
Hurvin Anderson, Lower Lake , 2005 I've been twice now to the Tate's Hurvin Anderson exhibition - a refreshingly cool, air-conditioned experience on these recent hot days, even though many of his landscape paintings depict tropical vegetation and sunlit Caribbean beaches. In her catalogue essay, 'Home and the World: The Britishness of Hurvin Anderson's Diasporic Landscapes', Gillian Forrester…
Mrs Fox with her Stormy Landscapes Here is a landscape painter I have never featured before, Mrs Fox. Her stormy landscapes (painted in miniature by Turlo Girffin ) are in the Design Museum's Wes Anderson exhibition, which I visited recently with my son Torin, an art student and Wes aficionado. As you can see below, there were also miniature landscapes on a vending machine from Asteroid City, a…
I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to…
The Epic of Everest (1924) is an extraordinary landscape film - mainly shot in black and white but sometimes tinted in vivid colours, including pink, as you can see above. It was shot by John Noel, 'a soldier by profession but an artist in spirit', as Wade Johnson says in an excellent Sight & Sound essay He was heavily influenced by Herbert Ponting's footage of the equally ill-fated Antarctic…
Michael Snow, still from La Région Centrale , 1971 I thought I would focus here on a fascinating work of landscape art that I have only briefly referred to previously . In the late sixties, Michael Snow created three seminal 'camera motion' films which influenced later structural and minimal cinema. La Région Centrale was the third of these, made in the Canadian wilderness using a Camera…
All at once I was standing, almost without being aware of it, on that other earth in the bright sunlight of a paradisal day. I was apparently standing on one of the islands which on our earth make up the Greek archipelago, or somewhere on the coast of the mainland adjoining that archipelago. Ah, it was all exactly as with us, but it seemed that everywhere glowed with a kind of festive air, some…
Round Soria the land is dry and cold. Over the hills, the barren ranges, through green bits of meadow, up the cindery peaks the spring advances, leaving its small white daisies scattered in the fragrant grasses. The earth is not reborn: the country dreams... - from 'The Soria Country' by Antonio Machado, trans. Alan S. Trueblood In 1909 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a leading…
Joachim Patinir's workshop, Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape , c. 1515 The National Gallery's early landscape-related art is now in a Sainsbury Wing room called 'Looking at Nature: European Painting 1430-1540.' One of the works there is Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape , attributed to the workshop of Joachim Patinir. I've always loved looking into this - as Erika Langmuir wrote in the 1997 NG…
Conrad Martens, HMS Beagle being hailed by native Fuegians, 1832 Following a visit to Charles Darwin's home Down House earlier this year, I read the The Voyage of the Beagle (1845 - the second edition which incorporated extensive revisions and looked forward to his theory of evolution). It really is a fascinating account, in which Darwin experiences an earthquake in Chile, climbs the Andes, meets…
This is 'Barbara Codonia', a depiction of the 'landscape' of northern Germany drawn by Dürer or his school, incorporating the names of places and longitude and latitude around the borders. In the northern sea there are islands - Thule (Tyle), probably one of the Shetland Islands, Iceland (Islandi), Scandia, Gottia and somewhere that might be Svalbard. It is an illustration from the Quatuor libri…
Marc Chagall, sketch of a curtain for The Firebird Act 1, 'The Enchanted Forest', 1945 We were in Nice last week and visited the Chagall Museum. It has an exhibition on at the moment that includes sixty-four sketches for the stage curtains and costumes used for the New York Ballet's revival of The Firebird in 1945. I was drawn to the image above, a landscape as seen through the distinctive…
Mountains in the Classical Tradition was a research project based at St. Andrews University from 2017 to 2023. It incorporated a blog which considered, among other cultural topics, ' William Golding at Thermopylae ' and ' Edward Dodwell on Mt. Hymettos ' (the subject of a post here back in 2013). In ' Augustus Hare on Mt. Soracte ' Jason Konig discusses the travel writer and watercolourist who…
Detail from The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening The Courtauld exhibition Seurat and the Sea is well worth getting to - not cheap, but of course it gets you access to the splendours of the permanent collection and there are many pictures you would normally have to travel a long way to see. The painting below was borrowed from MOMA, the study for it is usually in the Pompidou Centre and the conte…
In April 2018 I wrote a blog post here about blossom viewing: 'last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom. It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a crab apple tree, but it's a perfectly good stand-in).' We are holding another gathering tomorrow and this time I was inspired by the cherry trees in Regent's Park…
Sean Scully, Aran , 2005 Sean Scully was the subject of a profile in the Guardian earlier this year with a clickbaity headline: ''I’m the product of a smashed-up family': how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive.' Of course abstract painters often seek inspiration for forms, rhythm and colour from landscape, and Scully is one such artist. You can see this in various ways at the…
Today I paid a second visit to the Tate's Turner & Constable exhibition. The Guardian paraphrased Adrian Searle's review as 'boiling portentous skies versus two men and a dog' and provided the verdict upfront: 'JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show.' Few other reviewers were tempted to play the game of siding with one or the other, although The Tatler went for Turner - 'he was…
A place with a pond , in the fifth month when the rains are falling, is a very moving thing. It's deeply affecting to sit for hours on end staring out at the garden, a sea of monochrome soft green with the pond's water as deep green as the sweet flag and reeds that crowd it, and the heavy rain clouds hanging above. Indeed all places with ponds are at all times moving and delightful, and of course…
I just finished reading this wonderfully depressing novel by Jon Fosse. It is about the Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose strange paintings I wrote about here a decade ago. I was writing then about a TV programme in which Andrew Graham-Dixon suggested that Hertervig's traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf was like the…
Utagawa Hiroshige, Listening to Insects at D ō kan Hill , from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, 1835-1845 This is one of the prints that was on display in the British Museum's exhibition Hiroshige: artist of the open road last year. Lafcadio Hearn published an essay on 'insect musicians' and the listening practices surrounding them in his collection Exotics and Retrospectives…
At the Small Publishers Fair last year I caught a reading by John Bevis from A Surrey Naturalist , his new collection of eighty found poems derived from an old book by the broadcaster and conservationist Eric Parker. Afterwards I talked to John and his publisher Colin Sackett about the techniques of found poetry and the challenges of writing about the landscape of your childhood. His main method…