The empty landscapes of the Landes

Théodore Rousseau, Swamp in the Landes, after 1844

I have been so impressed by Kelly Presutti's Land into Landscape that I can't resist one more post on it, highlighting her chapter on 'Wetlands'. Here is a painting she writes about by Théodore Rousseau, the Barbizon painter whose 'ecological' approach to painting entangled trees, untouched by the state's foresters, features in her chapter on 'Forests'.  The Landes, remote from Paris and considered a backward, featureless waste had never attracted landscape painters until Rousseau and Jules Dupré made a trip to the region in 1844. Rousseau's landscape is very different from his dense depictions of Fontainebleau Forest. 

Silvery-white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image without gathering in any defined area. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally across the canvas in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal region. Two-thirds of the canvas is devoted to the sky, but it is a sky that is in intense dialogue with the ground below, picking up on those waterways and creating parallel streams of light and dark above. There are no foreground framing elements; on the contrary, the foreground passes hazily into the middle ground and distance without clear delineation. The scene has regional details, including the scrawny Atlantic pine, a loosely penned-in area with what are likely cattle, and in the far distance what could be sails, as though our gaze might extend to the ocean. It is difficult to measure or grasp the distance covered. The details serve not to establish scale but instead to open up the image outward. Rousseau created an expansive vision, a positive counterpart to the uneasy vastness experienced by earlier travel writers.

Kelly Presutti goes on to discuss late nineteenth century efforts to drain the Landes and cover it with pine trees, a subject covered in Graham Robb's fine 2007 book The Discovery of France. He explains that not a single patch of the original Landes now remains: 

The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. 'The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind', he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory. 

Graham Robb reproduces this photograph with the caption: 'A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears' (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

Photographs like this are fascinating but Presutti also reproduces some of Arnaudin's extraordinary landscape views, so minimal they resemble Sugimoto seascapes. He inscribed a horizon line onto his camera lens in order to achieve this consistent framing. Rather than focus on detail like the flowering grasses, or highlight features like buildings or trees, Arnaudin wanted to capture and preserve the landscape's emptiness. In these images and his writing on the Landes he was 'reversing the terms of beauty and ugliness established by earlier commentators' and lauding 'the appeal of the desert, the dream of solitude, and the pleasure of the uninterrupted expanse.'   

A page of Arnaudin photographs from Land into Landscape  by Kelly Presutti

Changes to a Summit

 

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif, Les Aiguilles Rouges, 1874

This wonderful watercolour is reproduced in Kelly Presutti's excellent new book Land into Landscape. As she points out, the mountain panorama was evidently so vast it required sticking two sheets of paper together. Viollet-le-Duc is famous for having restored Carcassonne and Notre-Dame de Paris but he also spent eight summers making a study of Mont Blanc, culminating in the publication of a detailed map and 'study of its geodesic and geological construction, of its transformations, and of the old and modern state of its glaciers.' His book Le massif du Mont Blanc (1876) includes a fascinating diagram (see below) that begins with a purely geometric shape imagined as a more pristine original state, before the forces of erosion had turned it into the landscape equivalent of a ruined cathedral. This sequence looks like an illustration of the way computer game landscapes have evolved from grid frameworks (Atari's Battlezone) to the complex realism facilitated by 3D graphics cards. Painters had always produced idealised mountain forms but Viollet-le-Duc's 'treatise was meant to be practical and proscriptive, to pertain to an ambition to modify the real as much as an aspiration to evoke the ideal.' Presutti's book includes fascinating information about the steps taken in nineteenth century France to preserve mountains, through the establishment in 1882 of a government service dedicated to the Restauration des terrains en montaigne. 

 

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Changes to a Summit, 1876

  

At this time two new technologies were changing the ways mountains could be seen and depicted. One, obviously, was photography. The other was the 'teleiconograph', which Presutti describes in an article on the Yale University Pres website. 

Designed by fellow architect Henry Révoil, the teleiconograph combines a telescope with a camera obscura to bring distant points nearer and enable the observer to trace them onto a page. Révoil advertised the efficacy of his device by illustrating the sculptures on the rooftop of Notre Dame, an application sure to attract Viollet-le-Duc’s interest.The teleiconograph provided the kind of precise rendering Viollet-le-Duc needed to decipher the mountains. Using it, he produced detailed studies of peaks, carefully calibrating angles and timing his studies to coincide with optimal lighting conditions. Intricate lines trace the cuts and angle of rock faces; blank spaces denote areas concealed by snow. The resulting diagrams are less a picture of a mountain than a translation of its materiality into mathematical properties.

Every stone or shady tree

In the British Museum's print room you can currently see Raphael to Cozens: Drawings from the Richard Payne Knight bequest. Here are three of the landscapes and a few notes on each one.

Guercino, Landscape with Angelica and Medoro, c. 1621

I have only mentioned Guercino (1591-1666) once before on this blog and never talked about one of his pictures. The exhibition caption notes that 'the figures of the two lovers and Cupid in the drawing, inspired by characters in Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso (first published in 1516), are almost lost in Guercino's exuberant visual description of the landscape.' It was the names of these lovers carved in 'sundry places' that drove Orlando furioso - he was in love with Angelica. Here she is pointing at a tree, but the names also appear on a rock in front of them, because the lovers had been wandering around searching out 'every stone or shady tree,/ To grave their names with bodkin, knife or pin.' (This is from the first English translation by Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's 'saucy Godson' and inventor of the flush toilet.)

Claude Lorrain, The River Tiber see from the Monte Mario, c. 1640

What's really striking about this one is Claude's use of brown ink wash - other Claude drawings in the exhibition are more precise descriptions of trees or buildings which he could use later in his paintings. However, the BM website explains that 'the development of this brush technique can be followed within the early sketchbook and in pen-and-wash studies of the 1640s.' They also note that 'brush drawings of this kind attracted the ire of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, who described them disparagingly in Modern Painters as "blottesque landscape"'.

 

John Robert Cozens, Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro, c. 1777-78

Here, in the distance, is Mount Etna, which has recently been in the news, after erupting on June 2nd. Cozens accompanied Payne Knight on his second journey to Italy but didn't go as far as Sicily. This watercolour was therefore based on a study made by Charles Gore, transforming a topographical sketch into a study in the sublime. 'The figures are dwarfed by the trees and rocks and the bonfire, burning brilliantly against the moonlit sky. The hill and mountain brood menacingly in the background and the colours are subdued and subtly varied in tone. The poetic mood of the drawing is dark and sombre as a result.'