The Channel of Gravelines

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 crayon sketch is part of a collection of drawings owned by Jack Shear, the American curator and head of the Elsworth Kelly Foundation. These views were all executed in the last summer before Seurat's untimely death and it is sad to think that if he had lived as long as Matisse or Picasso he would have been around for abstract art and surrealism. One of my favourite paintings in London dates from the same summer, the Courtauld's The Beach at Gravelines, an astonishingly abstract composition, apparently painted for his own pleasure as it serves no purpose as a preparatory study.

Georges Seurat, The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening, 1890

While the other post-impressionists headed for the light and strong colours of the south, Seurat painted Gravelines, near Dunkirk, almost as far north as you can go in France (it is actually slightly further north than Brighton, where I grew up.) The exhibition curators explain that contemporary viewers 'were struck by Seurat's ability to convey atmosphere and by his subtle rendering of the pearly grey light of the Channel coast.'  The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening 'epitomises the contemplative and serene qualities of Seurat's seascapes that were so admired by early reviewers.' Paul Signac said 'this type of painting does not need bright light since it creates its own.' Adrian Searle, in his Guardian review, observes that 'the North Sea light is milky, turned down a notch from his summers farther south. A boat moves down the Channel at evening. There’s no one about in this violet hour, the sun gone, only the man on the boat and, I suppose, the painter following its progress.' 

Georges Seurat, study for The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening, 1890

The stillness in some of these seascapes has a strange, unsettling quality that made me think of artists like Léon Spillaert and Paul Nash. Joe Lloyd in Studio International writes that 'the emptiness and static quality of his scenes renders them stage-like. The grainy gauze of his technique makes them seem antithetical to the clarity with which our eyes perceive the world. The marines are thus simultaneously studied depictions of reality and oddly unreal simulacrums.' Reviewers prefer these paintings unpeopled - as Laura Cumming says 'the pictures go awry when stick figures appear in the foreground'. I agree, although (as in some of the landscapes painted by Claude and Turner) I quite like it when small, stiff and unrealistic figures create a strangeness that would otherwise be much less apparent. I'll leave the last word here to Laura Cumming (sadly, nowadays, often inaccessible behind The Observer paywall), talking about The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening. 'The most beautiful painting in this exhibition, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shows Gravelines at twilight, where the waters have quietened to a silvery brightness and the sky above is pink-tinged with dying light.' 

Georges Seurat, Gravelines: An Evening, 1890

Blossoms scattering on echoes

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 (see above). Im preparation I have been writing out some of my favourite translated Japanese blossom poems on cards decorated with fallen petals. For example, this one by Nōin (988-1050) in which the falling flowers suggest a mountain soundscape: 

  To a mountain village 

    at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this: 

  blossoms scattering on echoes

    from the vespers bell.*

Kenneth Rexroth included a version in his One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, translating the last lines as petals scattering 'at the boom of the evening temple bell' which suggests they are taking fright at the sudden sound in a quiet place.

One of the best sources for blossom poetry is Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), a poet whose work I've discussed on this blog before. He too has one about arriving at night on a spring day and looking for lodging - when he sleeps the blossom continues to fall even in his dream. In another waka the 'wake of the breeze' scatters petals into wavelets that 'ripple out into the waterless sky.' And in another, the wind is not cold, but the scattering cherry blossoms still resemble a snow flurry. Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems has one in which the poet loses his way in the confusion of so many petals falling. And the Met has a Ki no Tsurayuki blossom poem written out in the 17th century on decorated paper:

  The scent of blossoms 

    has soaked ever deeper

      into our robes

  as breezes come and go

    in the shade of the trees.    

 

^*Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134. I try not to quote whole poems but others have done so already, so I've included it here.

The endless redrawn shoreline

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 Lisson Gallery's exhibition, The Nature of Art, which I visited last month. Aran (2005), for example, is a grid of the dry stone walls I have explored and photographed myself (see my earlier post 'Sentences on the sea', with quotes from Tim Robinson). He produced a book of these images, Walls of Aran, which has an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Scully was born in Ireland but grew up in London and did manual jobs while training to be an artist - he has talked about how he enjoyed seeing the forms made by stacking cardboard boxes in a factory. It is obvious why these carefully stacked stones of Aran would appeal to him.  

Landscape has most clearly influenced Scully's art in the Landlines series. An article in the Smithsonian magazine explains the origin of these works. 

It was 1999 when the artist Sean Scully approached the edge of a grassy cliff in Norfolk, England, out to the blue-green of the North Sea and the steely gray sky above it. “I saw a beautiful cliff and a very unusual possibility for a composition,” he says. The resulting photograph Land Sea Sky presented those three elements in roughly equal stripes across the pictorial space. ... “I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending,” he says, “the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their color, and the soft uncertain space between them.”

I have taken many photographs over the years of land, sea and sky forming bands of colours - I imagine we all have. I like the way you can vary the components - in Sussex you can also look back from the shoreline to photograph beach, cliffs and sky: grey, white and blue. The Lisson exhibition includes some of Scully's photographs, like Landline 1999 (brown, white, blue - land, surf, sea) and Landline (Lima Sunset) (2019) where, like Hiroshi Sugimoto, he just has two rectangles of sea and sky. Artists have been painting these bands of colour on the coast since The Monk and the Sea - on this blog I've mentioned Strindberg's Coastal Landscape II (1903) and Spilliaert's, Seascape Seen from Mariakerke (1909), but there was also Seurat at Gravelines, Richard Diebenkorn at Ocean Park, Patrick Heron at St. Ives, Brice Marden's Sea Paintings and Gerhard Richter's Seascapes. You could design a fascinating exhibition bringing images like these together. A few years ago Scully was invited to show new work at the National Gallery and his exhibition 'Sea Star' also included a near-abstract canvas by Turner, The Evening Star (1830).

Sean Scully, Natured (the endless redrawn shoreline) 12.22.25, 2025

Today I was in town again on my way to a Bernd and Hilla Becher show (excellent, but not really landscape art so I can't discuss it here) and walked through Hanover Square, where I took the photo below. This is a sculptural version of the Landline series, made from five blocks of marble. I guess it is always hard to write about art like this convincingly - when it was installed Scully explained that "marble is a natural material that is taken from the ground and has, as a consequence, a profound relationship with Nature." Hmm. Maybe he was partly thinking that it contrasts with the manufactured bronze used to cast the statue of William Pitt that stands across the road from it? The press release explained that 'the selected marbles translate the layered landscape of Hanover Square itself, the new gardens and surrounding buildings - the grey, sand and ochre of the footways and buildings, and the greens and blue- greens of the trees.' And you can see this in my image below, if you focus on the buildings and imagine more foliage and a more typical grey London day. Scully has simplified a complex townscape into a layering of colours resembling the naturally abstract views we experience on the edge of the sea.    

Sean Scully, Landline, 2023

Fire and Water

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 the out-and-out winner.' I don't think there's much doubt they were the two greatest landscape painters of their era - it's not like the 'who is best, Blur or Oasis?' debate, where the sensible verdict was always "Pulp". But their differences continue to fascinate - as the wall text above states one was 'all truth', the other 'poetry' and, as can clearly be seen at the Tate, where Constable's clouds and light-flecked trees and rivers sit alongside Turner's hazy, sunset vistas, 'one is silver, the other gold.'

At the risk of being annoying, I thought I would take the absurdity of ranking these two artists seriously and apply the crass five star system we are familiar with from movie reviews. I wasn't sure how this would come out, although I was expecting to side with poetry over truth, or what George Shaw describes in the exhibition film as Turner's elemental alignment with the air, over Constable's allegiance to the earth. In the first room of early work, leaving aside sketchbooks, each artist had 12 paintings and Turner edges it (37 versus 34, or 3.1 v 2.8 on average, per painting). We then move to two Turner and two Constable rooms. Turner's average for some lovely watercolours is brought down to 2.9 by four less impressive oil sketches, but he gets a 3.2 for his Alpine scenes. Constable 'in the outdoors' includes some of his less interesting sketches (2.6) but the room devoted to fields and skies features his celebrated cloud studies and paintings around Dedham (3.2). Overall, Turner is just in the lead as we come to a room called 'The Exhibition' which pits four Constables against five Turners. Here at least I have to agree with Searle, the perfection of Constable's The White Horse and sheer energy in his The Leaping Horse make him the clear winner.  

John Constable, Watermeadows at Salisbury, 1820

The next display, 'Fire and Water', includes this serene view of the landscape near Salisbury. As you look at it, you almost can't believe you're not looking at real water. The wall text explains that in 1830 it got accidentally assessed as a potential Royal Academy exhibit, while Constable was on the committee. His colleagues 'condemned it as 'a poor thing' that was 'very green'. Perhaps out of embarrassment, Constable stayed quiet.' Well it got five stars from me and Constable wins this room, with his famous views of Salisbury Cathedral and Hadleigh Castle easily beating Turner's Palace of Caligula. The next room has a clip from the Mike Leigh film Mr. Turner, which I wrote about here in 2015. Back then I quoted a review of an earlier Tate exhibition (in 2009) which viewed the artists as rivals, showing Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge alongside the Turner seascape it had overshadowed at the Royal Academy, until Turner cheekily added a red buoy on varnishing day. The Constable is on show here too, along with some of his later works which I don't find very appealing (2.4). The late Turners - Venice, the Blue Rigi, the swirling Snow Storm are always astonishing (3.9). The last room, 'Landscape and Memory' has one of my favourite paintings, Turner's Norham Castle, Sunrise, but also reminds you of the variety of Constable's work - from his detailed drawing of trees on Hampstead Heath to his dramatic depiction of Stonehenge (Turner 3.5, Constable 3.7). 

So who came out on top? Well, Constable got a grand total of 221. And Turner's scores added up to... 221 as well! However, Constable, by my reckoning, had 72 paintings in the show and Turner just 66, so I declare Turner the winner.

A place with a pond

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 this is so too on winter mornings when the water is frozen over. Rather than a carefully tended pond, I find delightful the sort that have been left neglected to the rampant water weed, where patches of reflected moonlight gleam whitely on the water here and there between the swathes of green.
All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be.

- The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (trans. Meredith McKinney 

I don't seem to have ever devoted a blog post to Sei Shōnagon, whose Pillow Book has been an inexhaustible source of pleasure over the years. Many of her entries on landscape are simple lists of place names she found attractive. As McKinney says in his notes, 'the charm mostly lies in the poetic associations of the name, and/or its meaning. The place itself as a geographical entity is not the point.' In an earlier section of the book, she describes why she highlights nine favourite ponds.

1. Katsumata Pond - Sei Shōnagona simply names this place, which features in the Man'yōshū collection of waka poems. It was near Toshodaiji and Yakushiji Temples in Nara.
2. Iware Pond - the possible remains of this pond in Nara were uncovered a few years ago. There is a monument there with lines from a poem written by a son of the emperor: “This is my last chance to see the ducks singing in the Iware Pond as I am destined to die today.”
3. Nieno Pond - this was somewhere Sei Shōnagon visited while on a pilgrimage to Hase. 'It was marvellous to see seemingly endless flocks of water birds rising noisily from this pond.'
4. Waterless Pond - so called because it sometimes dried up. It sounds very similar to the pond on Blackheath that I wrote about here recently. 
5. Sarusawa Pond - a 'special place' because it features in poems composed for an emperor to mourn one of the Palace Maidens, who had drowned herself. Sei Shōnagon quotes a memorable line attributed to Hitomoro that describes 'her hair tangled as if in sleep.'
6. 'Divine Presence Pond' - Shōnagon doesn't know why this one got its name. 
7. Sayama Pond - another literary site. She recalls a poet who said you can draw burr reed out of the water but if you to try to draw him from his lover's bed, 'ah I break'. 
8. Koinuma Pond - 'there's also Koinuma Pond' is all she says and I'm not sure what was special about this place.
9. Hara Pond - the last pond in her list was associated with a popular song: 'oh do not cut the jewelled weeds.'

Hasui Kawase, Sarusawa Pond, Nara, 1935

It would of course be possible to come up with similar lists of favourite ponds in England, but I will conclude here with just one example. Last summer I visited Silent Pool in Surrey, which has an evocative Japanese sounding name, although as our Rough Guide explained, it is not completely silent because you can hear traffic from the road. The water was a vivid green with pondweed, eelgrass and the reflections of surrounding trees in full leaf. The guidebook records a folk legend associated with this place that Sei Shōnagon might have appreciated: ‘A woodman's daughter was bathing in the Silent Pool when a caddish nobleman appeared. He rode his horse into the water to reach her and she drowned trying to escape him. Her father found the body and the nobleman’s hat floating on the water, which, in a sinister twist, bore the emblem of Prince John, suggesting that the future king of England was the culprit.’

Silent Pool, August 2025

Borgøya Island

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 shock of Norway's transition from a rural backwater to a modern state. Here's how I related the artist's sad story, which inspired John Fosse's Melancholy I-II:

One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her. But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students. This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad. After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family.

That terrible bullying experience at the hands of his fellow painters is powerfully evoked through interior monologue in the first part of the book. In Part 2 we find Hertervig suffering in the Gaustad asylum, while Part 3 is told from the perspective of a modern-day writer who has an emotional, quasi-religious experience in front of Hertervig's painting Borgøya Island. The fourth part, Melancholy II, was added in 1996 and is perhaps the most upsetting section of all, tracing the thoughts of Hertervig's elderly, incontinent sister during the course of one afternoon, soon after his death in 1902.

Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

While reading the first part of the novel, set on that fateful day in the Autumn of 1853, I was curious to know more about the "painters who can't paint", as Hertervig describes his contemporaries. He excludes from this judgement Hans Bude, the Düsseldorf Art Academy's young Norwegian tutor. Hertervig, in the novel, frets about whether Bude will criticise his art, although when they meet each other in the street Bude is encouraging. It wasn't artistic criticism that precipitated Hertervig's breakdown. Fosse also mentions 'Tidemann' who I took to be Adolph Tidemand, another older Norwegian artist. Tidemand's talent for figure painting led him to collaborate with Gude on landscape scenes like the Bridal Procession I have reproduced below. The place where all these painters used to meet up in Düsseldorf was Malkasten, which I imagined as a large beer hall full of students. In fact it was a renowned artist's association ('Malkasten' means Painter's Box) which in Hertervig's day hired out restaurant rooms. Malkasten was founded in 1848 and is still going today, having undergone numerous changes over the years (they now have a bar 'where art meets gastronomy').

Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, 1848 

When Hertervig first enters Malkasten, already in a fragile state, he encounters 'Alfred', who will later go out of his way to deceive him into thinking Helene, the girl he loves, is sitting somewhere at the back of the bar. There were a few real artists at that time called Alfred, but I am guessing he is not based on an actual person? (If any Fosse or Hertervig experts are reading this, feel free to put me right!) Another artist we encounter is 'Müller' who must be Morten Müller (1828-1911), a painter whose views of fjords and pine forests can be seen in Norway's National Gallery. 'Capellen' is briefly mentioned too, presumably August Capellen (1827-52) although he died of cancer the year before the novel is set and doesn't appear as a character. Alfred's main accomplice is 'Bodom' and he too was a real person, the Norwegian landscape painter Erik Bodom (1829-79) who Hertervig admits "can paint. But Bodom is not as good a painter as I am." 

Erik Bodom, Landscape with a Waterfall, 1855

As Hertervig talks to Bodom he is increasingly confused with sexual delusions, visions of Helene and images from his past life on Borgøya Island. Something is clearly wrong... 

This is your first time at Malkasten, isn't it, he says.
And I look straight into Bodom's eyes, and his eyes are grinning, I see Bodom's eyes grinning and just like that his eyes turn into bog-holes, black, wet, and then someone pulling, sinking, splashing in the bog, hard, the hand moves fast, pulls up, down, tightens, tightens, and I can't pull my foot free and it's stuck and then, up ahead, is the light that sucks and comes at me and pulls me down...

Listening to Insects at Dōkan Hill

Utagawa Hiroshige, Listening to Insects at Dōkan 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 (1898):

There are charming references to singing-insects in poetical collections made during the tenth century, and doubtless containing many compositions of a yet earlier period. And just as places famous for cherry, plum, or other blossoming trees, are still regularly visited every year by thousands and tens of thousands, merely for the delight of seeing the flowers in their seasons,—so in ancient times city-dwellers made autumn excursions to country-districts simply for the pleasure of hearing the chirruping choruses of crickets and of locusts,—the night-singers especially. Centuries ago places were noted as pleasure-resorts solely because of this melodious attraction;—such were Musashino (now Tōkyō), Yatano in the province of Echizen, and Mano in the province of Ōmi. Somewhat later, probably, people discovered that each of the principal species of singing-insects haunted by preference some particular locality, where its peculiar chanting could be heard to the best advantage; and eventually no less than eleven places became famous throughout Japan for different kinds of insect-music. [He goes on to list them...]

The Hiroshige print is analysed in a 2023 acoustic ecology paper by soundscape researcher Keiko Torigoe. She includes a description of Dōkan Hill from the Edo Meisho Zue (1834-6).

There are many medicinal herbs in this area, and people who gather medicines always come here. Especially in autumn, pine insects and bell ringers make exquisite sounds. Therefore, courtesans and persons of elegance and refinement all come here to recite poems in the winds and sing songs under the moon, appreciating the sound of the insects.

The pine insect is the matsumushi 'much esteemed for the peculiar clearness and sweetness of its notes', according to Hearn, and the bell ringer is the suzumushi which 'in certain lonesome places might easily be mistaken,—as it has been by myself more than once,—for the sound of rapids.' You can hear what they sound like on YouTube: here are links for the pine cricket and bell cricket. There is actually a temple in Kyoto known as Suzumushidera because the monks keep bell crickets there to sing all year round.  

Dōkan Hill features in other 19th century prints. Hiroshige's son-in-law Suzuki Chinpei (Hiroshige II) composed a scene similar to the one above in 1864: Listening to insects on Dōkan Hill. There is a comic 1859 scene by Utagawa Hirokage called Catching fireflies at Mount Dōkan, which the Library of Congress describes as showing 'four men drinking alcoholic beverages in a field at night' (one of them is rolling round, clearly pissed as a pudding). And in 1884 Kobayashi Kiyochika depicted a couple climbing the hill to enjoy the views, whilst in the foreground a horse looks startled, perhaps by the sight of some huge white daikon radishes lying on the floor. I'll end here with another example: a simple and rather lovely pink and turquoise view of the landscape below Dōkan Hill, by Hiroshige himself.    

Utagawa Hiroshige, Below Dokan Hill, 

from the series Twelve Views of Edo, c. 1835