The waves were like agate

 

Eugène Delacroix, Sunset, c. 1850

I have been reading the Journals of Eugène Delacroix in a lovely, pristine Folio edition I found in a secondhand bookshop in York (the selections were originally translated by Lucy Norton for Phaidon in 1951). Most of what Delacroix writes about concerns art - how to achieve the effects he wants and admires in great artists of the past like Rubens and Titian. Landscape art as such was not a particular concern for him, although he was always looking at the way other artists painted skies, trees and waves. The appeal of the journals is the way they mix his ideas on aesthetics with everyday concerns - health, relationships, conversations, travel. I thought here I would just extract a few moments where he writes about walks in nature and describes views with the eye of a great painter. In 1849 he was fifty-one and dividing his time between Paris and Champrosay, now in the city's southern suburbs, with holidays on the Normandy coast near Dieppe.

Champrosay, 24 June 1849

In the morning it had been thundery and oppressive, but by the afternoon the quality of the heat had changed and the setting sun lent everything a gaiety which I never used to see in the evening light. I find that, as I grow older, I am becoming less susceptible to those feelings of deepest melancholy that used to come over me when I looked at nature, and I congratulated myself on this as I walked along.

Valmont, 9 October 1849

We went down to the sea by a little path on the right which was unfamiliar to me. There was the loveliest greensward imaginable, sloping gently downwards, from the top of which we had a view of the vast expanse of sea. I am always deeply stirred by the great line of the sea, all blue or green or rose-coloured - that indefinable colour of a vast ocean. The intermittent sound reaches from far away and this, with the smell of the ozone, is actually intoxicating.

Cany, 10 October 1849

Magnificent view as we climbed the hill out of Cany; tones of cobalt in the green masses of the background in contrast to the vivid green and occasional gold tones in the foreground.

Champosay, 27 October 1853

Went for a stroll in the garden and then stood for a long time under the poplars at Baÿvet; they delight me beyond words, especially the white poplars when they are beginning to turn yellow. I lay down on the ground to see them silhouetted against the blue sky with their leaves blowing off in the wind and falling off about me.

Paris, 5 August 1854

A lump of coal or a piece of flint may show in reduced proportions the form of enormous rocks. I noticed the same thing when I was in Dieppe. Among the rocks that are covered by the sea at high tide I could see bays and inlets, beetling crags overhanging deep gorges, winding valleys, in fact all the natural features which we find in the world around us. It is the same with waves which are themselves divided into smaller waves and then subdivided into ripples, each showing the same accidents of light and the same design.

Dieppe, 25 August 1854

During my walk this morning I spent a long time studying the sea. The sun was behind me and thus the face of the waves as they lifted towards me was yellow; the side turned towards the horizon reflected the colour of the sky. Cloud shadows passing over all this made delightful effects; in the distance where the sea was blue and green, the shadows appeared purple, and a golden and purple tone extended over the nearer part as well, where the shadow covered it. The waves were like agate. 

Dieppe, 17 September 1854

A rather miserable dinner. However, when I went down to the beach, I was compensated by seeing the setting sun amidst banks of ominous-looking red and gold clouds. These were reflected in the sea, which was dark wherever it did not catch the reflection. I stood motionless for more than half an hour on the very edge of the waves, never growing tired of their fury, of the foam and the backwash and the crash of the rolling pebbles.

Path of the Wind

December's Wire magazine included an interesting 'Aeolian Harp Music 15' chart compiled by Irish experimental musician Natalia Beylis. There is no explanatory text, just the list, but a bit more info on a Dublin Digital Radio mixcloud site: 'I went to buy a theremin off a retired plumber in Clare. He toured me through his workshop of trinkets & said "I'm building an aeolian harp inspired by this fellow" & showed me a copy of an lp by Sverre Larssen. Back at home, I fell down a windharp rabbit hole & put this show together...' You can listen to the Sverre Larssen album shown above on Spotify. Here's what his Bandcamp page says:

In the early 1970s the Norwegian businessman Sverre Larssen decided to construct a wind harp at his cabin at Sele, Jæren on the west coast of Norway. Using his free imagination and amateur engineering skills, Larssen constructed a harp with 12-strings, which was brought to vibrate by the wind. Based on the principle of the electrical guitar, Larssen amplified the strings using four contact microphones and then recorded the sounds direct to tape. Word about Sverre Larssen’s instrument began to spread and during the 1970s notable artists such as Liv Dommersnes, Åse-Marie Nesse, Ketil Bjørnstad, Kjell Bækkelund and Jan Garbarek utilized the sounds of Larssen’s wind harp.

The next one on her list is The Wind Harp, an LP released by United Artists. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: 

In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30-foot-tall (9.1 m) Aeolian harp designed and built by 22-year-old Thomas Ward McCain on a hilltop in Chelsea, Vermont. United released their double LP titled The Wind Harp: Song from the Hill. An excerpt of this recording appears in the movie The Exorcist. The harp was destroyed in a hurricane, but it was rebuilt and now resides in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

There isn't a huge amount about this online and I get 'this content isn't avilable in your region' when I try one link. Nevertheless, if you go back more than a decade, when for example I wrote here about the wind resonating wires of Alan Lamb in New Zealand, it was a lot harder to find out about modern Aeolian harps. Now it really is possible via Discogs, YouTube and Google to just click away and head down a "windharp rabbit hole", even if you are often left with incomplete information. Another American wind harp Natalia Beylis lists is a case in point. 

Ron Konzak came up with the idea for his Aeolian harp in 1982 and, as his article on the Harp Spectrum website relates, he began building it at a location on Bainbridge Island, Puget Sound. Sadly a few years later it had become 'a forlorn sight: a two-story harp, perilously close to an eroding cliff, surrounded by young alder trees that screen it from the very breezes that could bring it to life.' He said there were plans to rebuild it, but did this ever happen? I found a recent blog post on a sailing site that describes seeing the harp's building but not the harp itself. The author tried to get in contact with Konzak but learned he had died in 2008. 'Other efforts to find more information, including asking a harp-playing friend who lives on Bainbridge Island were also unsuccessful.'  

I've mentioned the environmental recordings put out by Gruenrekorder before (see for example a post I did back in 2009) and they are very good at providing background information on what they release. One of their albums included on this list is Path of the Wind by Eisuke Yanagisawa - music made on a small home-made Aeolian harp. The landscapes he took it to include 'Kehi no Matsubara, a quiet and scenic beach with many pine trees', Mt. Oeyama where 'nature and objects on the mountainside fade in and out as the place where the sunlight shines gradually changes' and Yosano-cho, where he placed the harp near a 1,200-year-old Camellia tree. You can read reviews and commentary on the Greunrekorder website.

Drift by Mark Garry and Sean Carpio began with a site-specific performance. As explained on the Kerlin Gallery site, this

took place in a natural amphitheater called “Horseshoe Bay” on Sherkin Island, located off the coast of West Cork. This one-off performance took place in and around the bay, with audience members arriving on two passenger ferries, moored next to a traditional Irish wooden sail boat which bore an Aeolian harp (a harp played by the wind). On land, a brass quartet performed a series of short musical pieces based on Sumerian Hymns, which were controlled by a form of improvised conducting.

A subsequent record was made with two saxophonists, an accordionist and three Aeolian harps positioned in a small forest in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. 

Of course Aeolian harps were all the rage in the Romantic period and this list includes some recordings made by Mins Minssen using an instrument built in 1837 by Wilhelm Peter Melhop (1802-68). Melhop is quite an interesting figure from a landscape perspective - he wrote poems, stories and descriptions of his walks. According to German Wikipedia he 'kept a diary from 1816 to 1844, which he provided with his own illustrations. The entries show that he was often in nature, especially in the Wandsbeker wood, where he was impressed by the “magical abundance of nightingale song”'. In addition to building Aeolian harps he constructed a telescope and discovered a comet.

Another historical recording with a link to nature writing is Kenneth Turkington's Walden Winds, an attempt to recreate the sound of the kind of harp Thoreau built for himself (see sleeve notes from Discogs below). I looked into getting a window harp myself a few years ago (they were available on EBay) but decided it wouldn't be worthwhile as any subtle wind-plucked notes would be drowned out by the noise of children in surrounding gardens, delivery vans trundling down the road and police sirens heading up our local high street. 

If you want to continue down the rabbit hole, here are the other wind harps mentioned on Natalia Beylis's list...

• Mario Bertoncini was an Italian avant garde composer whose music for Aeolian harps can be found on a CD and accompanying book.
  
• Nature's Dream-Harp: Aeolian Music, Played by the Summer Wind on Devaharp I is a 1979 private pressing album by Robert Archer, about whom I can find no further information. 
• Aeolica was recorded in 1988 by Pier Luigi Andreoni and Francesco Paladino and features them improvising on synthesisers to the sound of a wind harp created by the artist Mario Ciccioli.
• Voices of the Wind is a set of recordings of his Aeolian harps made in the nineties by Roger Winfield.
• There are some field recordings of wind made in 1996 in France by Toy Bizarre (Cédric Peyronnet) - the ep cover shows the harp used for this purpose.
  
• Rick Tarquinio's experiments using fishing string and natural forces to create soundscapes are available on his Bandcamp page - they're pretty good.
• Something more recent from Tara Baoth Mooney is hard to envisage from a description - I'm not sure whether this genuinely used an Aeolian harp??
• And finally there's Rhodri Davies, a much more familiar name from his own harp recordings and collaborations (including the mighty Hen Ogledd). He is in the list for Five Knots from 2008, made with an electric harp: 'left channel: harp facing Anglesey', 'right channel: harp facing Lochtyn island'.

Dosso di Trento

Albrecht Dürer, Trintberg - Dosso di Trento, 1495

 

I recently visited the National Gallery's Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, which I had been looking forward to all year, although I was forewarned that it would be a disappointment by Laura Cummings' Guardian review. She notes that 

There is no clear chronology and barely any discernible narrative. The show feels on the one hand congested – too many passengers on board – and on the other, lacking in the forcefield presence of the German master. A humdrum portrait medal of Dürer, instead of a single one of his many self-portraits in ink, chalk, silverpoint or paint – so spectacular, so pioneering, so original – can only mean inevitable bathos. Still, there are marvels by Dürer along the way. He is up there in the Alps getting an image of the shelter down on paper: noticing the fragility of the ruined roof and the weirdly human profile of the foreground rocks...

I let that quote run on to the comment about the shelter because I too was struck by this incomplete sketch. I had been hoping to see in this exhibition some landscape sketches like the wonderful View of the Arco Valley in the Tyrol owned by The Louvre. There was just one - see my photo above: a simplified view of Trento outlined against what appears to be a blank sky. In reality Trento is surrounded by green hills and mountains. This erasure of the landscape is even more striking in his sketch of the mountain shelter from twenty years later. It's almost as if the wider view is too vast and beautiful to capture in paint and so the artist turns his back on it, ignoring the towering rocks and trees around him and electing instead to draw the crumbling stone walls and roof beams of a vulnerable human structure.

Albrecht Dürer, Ruin of an Alpine Shelter, 1515

Trees, possibly beside a lake

 Thomas Gainsborough, A View in Suffolk, c.1746

In 2017 Lindsay Stainton discovered that an album of 25 drawings in the Royal Collection were the work of the young Thomas Gainsborough. They are currently on show at York Art Gallery. These views may have been influenced by Dutch painting but they also reflect a deep engagement with the patterns and shapes of trees and paths near Gainsborough's home. I particularly enjoyed seeing his experimentation with different techniques. In the example below, he uses black and white chalk, sharpened and held in a porte-crayon. The curators note that 'he blended the chalks into the paper with a wad of tightly rolled leather, called stump, to create smoother tones and more subtle light effects. He employs this technique extensively to depict the soft outlines of the clouds and the misty pool.' In a finished painting (above) you still feel he's experimenting with ways of animating a simple view, with hazy light through mobile clouds creating interesting effects in every turn of the road and slope of the dunes.

 

Thomas Gainsborough, Trees, possibly beside a lake, c.1746 - 48 

It was a pleasure to leave the congested streets of York for the tranquillity of this exhibition, with its peaceful wooded vistas only occasionally interrupted by a distant figure or a donkey. In addition to the Gainsboroughs the exhibition includes a video installation, Clay, Peat, Cage (2015) by Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis, described as 'a contemporary counterpart to Gainsborough’s landscape practice.' Gainsborough mentally immersed himself in the details of his local woods and heathland. In 'Clay' Montserrat physically immerses herself in the soil, squatting naked, digging and smearing herself with earth. 'Clay' also provides a thematic link to the ceramics on display upstairs, which have become a speciality of the museum. If you are near York I would recommend popping in as you may have the exhibition almost to yourself as I did (see photo below). And Gainsborough's landscapes are a great tonic for the spirit in these difficult days. As John Constable once said, 'on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them.'