Sun-gilt lands of bright green pastures

A 19th century painting showing John Scott looking through a telescope at the Ware valley

In 2007 I wrote here about a prospect poem by John Scott of Amwell; I then added a postscript with more information in 2015. This is a further postscript really, but I'm writing a fresh blog post because I recently visited Ware and saw the summer house and grotto he built there. These are preserved in a fragment of what was once his extensive garden, leading down to the New River, which flows here alongside the Lea (they are now separated by the railway). For £2 you can enter and look around - the picture below shows the flint summer house, an 'airy octagon,' which would have provided a prospect of the vale. Scott wrote of the evening view here, of 'sun-gilt lands, / Of bright green pastures, stretch'd by rivers clear, / And willow groves, or other islands clear.' Today this prospect is obscured by trees and 1960s houses, although it could have been worse. The local developer was planning to bulldoze the grotto 'and erect Nos. 30-32 Scott’s Road on the site. The porch and dome of the Council Chamber were demolished, the summerhouse was damaged and the grotto was heavily vandalised.' The restoration work that has happened since then is really impressive.

The grotto is more extensive than I was expecting, with several passages, ventilation shafts and chambers all decorated with shells. Scott bought exotic shells from the Caribbean and South Pacific but also used cockle shells, white quartz and fossils from the beaches of Devon. The 'Council Chamber' is a nineteenth century name for the room shown below, with arched niches that you could imagine a group of illuminati sitting in to debate esoteric philosophical questions. Scott was clearly inspired by Pope, whose 'shell temple' at his Twickenham villa had started as a tunnel under the inconveniently sited road to Hampton Court. Samuel Johnson came to stay with Scott in 1773 and although he wasn't a fan of landscape gardening, he seems to have approved of the grotto, calling it a 'Fairy Hall'.

David Perman's detailed biography of Scott provides further information on the grotto and Scott's nature poetry, which was generally rather conventional, looking backwards to the era of James Thomson rather than anticipating the Romantic period to come. In reading this I was very surprised to learn that Scott had seemingly written about the great Chinese poet Li Bai in: 'Li-po : or, The good governor : a Chinese eclogue'. He can't have known the poetry, but maybe he had come across the name in a history of China? Regrettably, Scott doesn't actually refer to him as a poet and the details in the poem are hazy and don't correspond to the real life of Li Bai. The poem begins with the design of a pavilion - like Scott, Chinese literati were keen on building homes with good views and this Li-Po does not neglect to include a grotto. 'Bright shells and corals varied lustre shed; / From sparry grottos chrystal drops distill'd / On sounding brass, and air with music fill'd...' I'll conclude here with the landscape beyond the garden of Li-Po, a description familiar from eighteenth century chinoiserie, but also perhaps an imaginary equivalent to the river view Scott was able to enjoy.

The distant prospects well the sight might please, 

With pointed mountains, and romantic trees: 

From craggy cliffs, between the verdant shades, 

The silver rills rush'd down in bright cascades; 

O'er terrac'd steeps rich cotton harvests wav'd, 

And smooth canals the rice-clad valley lav'd; 

Long rows of cypress parted all the land, 

And tall pagodas crown'd the river's strand!

The Shores of Vaikus

This is a photograph I took at Käsmu in northern Estonia a few days ago. We went there from Tallinn on the bus (there's just one a day, leaving at 10:20, and one back in the early evening, but it is pretty easy to do and for some reason the driver handed out a small chocolate to every passenger). I wanted to see the erratic boulders which feature on the cover of The Shores of Vaikus, the latest volume of poems by Philip Gross (who I last discussed here fifteen years ago). Indeed it looks like Gross photographed the same view, although Bloodaxe have used poetic licence to reverse the image, so that the smaller boulders on the right feature on the book's back cover. The collection includes a poem 'Erratics' which I read to Mrs. Plinius after we had walked to the end of the promontory. We were here in the middle of the day whereas Gross describes the rocks' pink-bronze granite holding the warmth of evening, and the stillness of the water, its 'bay-wide swell too slight / to notice, almost, but for up-ripples of light...'   

Cover photo by Philip Gross for The Shores of Vaikus 

Glacial erratics seem obviously poetic - wanderers, messages from elsewhere. 'But then,' the poem says, 'all granite is in exile. Imagine the grief of magma, expelled from the Earth's core.' These rocks 'rode / the ice train down / from Finland' to stand waist-deep in the Baltic. They have names - in the photo below I am standing for scale next to Matsukivi, the largest erratic in Käsmu. In the forest 'you become aware of them, like grey beasts, something older than the elk. ... You might, if you've troubled to come so far, consult one.' Gross imagines staying with one till nightfall, until your bones start to hear the stone's voice. It's a lovely idea, but we couldn't linger too long in the woods as we were getting mercilessly bitten by midges. Also, we had a bus to catch, and nightfall in early July doesn't occur in northern Estonia until just before midnight. 

Pasture (and a Some Landscapes email feed)

Thanks for continuing to read this blog. Google's Blogger service has long since been overtaken by newer platforms (WordPress, Substack), but it would be hard to migrate to them, exporting all the stuff I have written. I find Blogger still serves my basic purpose, to provide ad-free, paid-subscription-free observations on landscape and culture that I can write quickly between a busy job and other commitments and projects. Unfortunately it has now been some years since Blogger provided an email feed feature to send new posts to anyone interested in getting them in their inbox. I've been told that the service they outsourced this to, Follow.It, is now full of spammy adverts and doesn't even have the content of the blog post - you have to click through to it. So, from today I am going to take matters into my own hands and create a list of subscribers so I can email them each new post when I publish it. Please feel free to unsubscribe from that annoying Follow.It service. 

If you want to be a subscriber, please email me at somelandscapes@gmail.com and I will add you to a blind carbon copy email list.

Līga Purmale, Pasture, 1980

Now I don't want this to be just a technical update, so I will also include a couple of attractive landscape paintings I saw in Riga last week. These are by Līga Purmale, who has a mere five line stub on Wikipedia, although you can read more about her on the exhibition website. She was born in 1948 and studied in the impressive-sounding Monumental Painting Workshop at the Teodors Zaļkalns Art Academy of the Latvian SSR. This institution is now just the Art Academy of Latvia, Zaļkalns name having been dropped as he was a big favourite in the USSR (awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1971). Purmale and her partner Miervaldis Polis started their careers painting in a photo-realist style, using effects like colour solarisation. Her 'Misty Landscapes' period came in the eighties and Pasture, above, reminded me of contemporary works by Gerhard Richter. The 'untruthful' beauty Richter achieved was a means of questioning how to paint landscape in a post-Nazi, post-Romantic, post-religious West Germany. I wonder if there was anything similar going on here, in what was still the Latvian SSR. As the decade went on, Purmale's paintings got mistier and emptier. I particularly like the near abstract image of branches in a garden below. Eventually she moved away from this approach onto other things, painting fragments of urban space, images inspired by cinema and mass media and, more recently, compositions that draw on old photographs of her family in the early twentieth century.   

Līga Purmale, Garden in the Evening, 1989

Latticework landscape

This latticework landscape is currently on display in Kensington High Street at the Japan House exhibition The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests. It was made five years ago by Sakae Tategu Kogei, the firm founded by Eiichi Yokota, a master of kumiko craft. 'The origins of kumiko likely date back to the Kamakura period (1185–1333), with techniques passed down through generations. The central process involves crafting thin, delicate pieces of wood and assembling them in various geometric patterns to form a seamless surface.' The different coloured woods include Japanese whitebark magnolia, Chinese pyramid juniper, lignitized Japanese castor aralia and Kiso hinoki cypress. The delicate shapes used to make the components of the landscape range from a basic triangle joint to the yae asa-no-ha (eight-layer hemp leaf) and dahlia patterns.   

The fact that some of these wooden patterns are named after natural forms does not of course mean that they are designed to signify dahlias or hemp leaves. My photo above shows the dahlia pattern and you can see this used in the mountain landscape for the third-from-bottom slope on the left. There is an interesting semiotic effect here, where flower shapes are used not to imply anything about vegetation in the scene. Instead they suggest the complexity of light and shade or strength of shadow on a particular slope. This reminds me of a broader feature of Chinese and Japanese arts where the names for technical components often evoke specific natural effects, but could have been used freely. To paint a whirlpool you could use the brush stroke tan wo ts’un ('like eddies of a whirlpool'), but maybe it would be more interesting to deploy the luan yün ts’un ('like rolling billows of cloud').   

We use kumiko coasters every day to put drinks and pans on but I don't remember seeing the technique used to create a landscape before. I would love to know more about the history of kumiko used in this way, but information online is scant. Simpler kumiko lattices (square and rectangles) are used on shoji screens which could themselves have landscapes painted onto them, although surely it is preferable to leave them blank. As Tanizaki said in praise of shadows: 'the light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.' The garden and landscape beyond can then be revealed by sliding the screen doors open.