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.'

Onuphrius in the wilderness

Master of the Darmstadt Passion, Saint Onuphrius, 1460

You could write a whole book about landscapes in depictions of the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers (and I would read it).  A chapter on Saint Onuphrius would certainly include this painting, which I photographed three years ago in Zurich.  The desert here resembles a summer lawn and the little stream seems to provide just enough water to irrigate a few herbs.  Also in Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Basel has an austere landscape from 1519 in which Onuphrius prays among bare red rocks and broken tree trunks. It was painted by a local artist, Conrad Schnitt.  Sadly there is no image freely available online - all I could find was one overwritten throughout with 'Alamy' to prevent copying.  I'm therefore only able to provide a tiny detail below, showing a distant building that I'm guessing is the monastery Onuphrius lived in before he headed into the desert.  In the Zurich painting there is a similarly-placed structure, which looks like a beautiful medieval castle standing out against the golden sky.

We only really know about Onuphrius from an account of Paphnutius the Ascetic, a fourth century Egyptian anchorite.  Paphnutius ventured into the desert to see what it would be like to be a hermit and there he saw a wild man covered in hair, wearing only leaves.  This was Onuphrius, who said he had survived as a hermit out there for seventy years.  They spoke until sunset and spent the night in prayer.  In the morning Onuphrius died and Paphnutous covered his body with a cloak and left it in a cleft in the rocks because the ground was too hard to bury him. 

Cornelis Cort, Saint Onuphrius, 1574

Source: Prints and Principles

  
You would think such an inhospitable place would always appear as a bleak-looking landscape in art.  But this isn't always the case, as can be seen in Cornelis Cort's print.  Here there are trees in full leaf and plentiful water in a wonderfully well-drawn river.  I have reproduced another print below by Albrecht Dürer.  It shows John the Baptist with a saint once thought to have been Saint Jerome, but as the National Gallery curators write, there is no lion to be seen and 'instead, the garland of hops points towards Saint Onuphrius.'  They note that 'the relatively densely worked areas in the centre of the print contrast with almost rudimental landscape in the background.'  However, for me, the distant vista is beautiful rather than 'rudimental', with its sense of space and light, and that sea fringed with trees and dotted with two small boats beneath waves of cloud... 

Albrecht Dürer, John the Baptist and Saint Onuphrius in the Wilderness, c. 1503-4

I won't try your patience here by describing lots more images of Onuphrius in the history of art.  There have been many icons in which his standing figure is placed in front of his cell, between hills or on a rocky plain.  Artists whose views of the saint are set in interesting wilderness landscapes include Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-1425), Francesco Morone (1471-1529), Jan van Haelbeck (1595-1635), Francisco Collantes (1599-1656) and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673).  I will conclude with just one more: a painting orginally made for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid.  The artist responsible for the figure of Onuphrius is not known but the painter of the landscape is unmistakable.  The life of a hermit in this sublime landscape looks almost inviting.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Saint Onuphrius, c. 1638

Source: Prado

In the mist of the secret and solitary hill

"I have given you the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley, both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic Muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who woos her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall."

An illustration to Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, from an edition of 1893

In my last post I wrote about the Chinese poetic ideal of hearing a guqin played in the landscape.  Here in Waverley (1814), the enchanting Flora McIvor is speaking to the eponymous hero, newly arrived in the Highlands, having led him to this perfect location to hear her 'imperfect translations' of Gaelic poetry, to the accompaniment of a harp.  This place of barren rocks and murmuring water might just as easily be the setting for a Chinese 'mountains and rivers' poem.  Making his way there, Waverley had found

'the rocks assumed a thousand peculiar and varied forms. In one place a crag of huge size presented its gigantic bulk, as if to forbid the passenger’s farther progress; and it was not until he approached its very base that Waverley discerned the sudden and acute turn by which the pathway wheeled its course around this formidable obstacle. In another spot the projecting rocks from the opposite sides of the chasm had approached so near to each other that two pine-trees laid across, and covered with turf, formed a rustic bridge at the height of at least one hundred and fifty feet. It had no ledges, and was barely three feet in breadth.'

From this vantage point Waverley had watched Flora cross the bridge, feeling all the emotions we associate with the Sublime.  The editor of the OUP edition of Waverley (Clare Lamont) notes that a similar bridge appeared in Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810), that an actual bridge of this kind existed, spanning Keltie Water, and that there had been other examples of heroines of sensibility crossing Alpine bridges in slightly earlier novels written by Ann Radcliffe and Jane Porter.  Passing under the bridge, Waverley found himself in 'a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher rose eminences and peaks, some bare, some clothed with wood, some round and purple with heath, and others splintered into rocks and crags.'  Then, turning the path, he came to the secluded spot where Flora would sing him her Highland song.

He found Flora gazing at 'a romantic waterfall.  It was not so remarkable either for great height or quantity of water as for the beautiful accompaniments which made the spot interesting.'  The description that follows is based on the falls of Ledard, as Scott explained in his own footnote.  Interestingly, the novel makes clear that this setting was not entirely wild.  'Mossy banks of turf were broken and interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs, some of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously that they added to the grace without diminishing the romantic wildness of the scene.'  Here, with the sun stooping in the west, Waverley gazes at Flora, thinking 'he had never, even in his wildest dreams, imagined a figure of such exquisite and interesting loveliness. The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around seemed to have been created an Eden in the wilderness.'

Reading this, you have the impression that the native Sublimity of the Highlands has somehow been infused with the light of Italy.  In the 1814 edition Scott described Flora by the waterfall as 'like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Claude'.  I have mentioned here before the awkwardness of Claude's figures; soon after publication a correspondent pointed out to Scott that 'Claude's figures are reckoned notoriously bad, & indeed he only used them as vehicles for a little blue, red or yellow drapery to set of his gradation of tints & throw his landscape into distance.'  Scott took his advice and substituted Poussin for Claude in subsequent editions.

Flora begins to sing, sitting on a mossy fragment of rock, 'at such a distance from the cascade that its sound should rather accompany than interrupt that of her voice and instrument [...] A few irregular strains introduced a prelude of a wild and peculiar tone, which harmonised well with the distant waterfall, and the soft sigh of the evening breeze in the rustling leaves of an aspen, which overhung the seat of the fair harpress.'  But her song is not dedicated to Nature, though it begins with the mist on the mountains.  The year is 1745, Flora is an ardent supporter of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Highlanders are about to rise and fight for the Jacobite rebellion.  Waverley, without firm political convictions, a lover of literature, is as yet unaware that the Young Pretender has landed at Glenaladale and raised his standard at Glenfinnan.  About to be caught up in the conflict (like one of those Chinese poets interrupted from their retreat in the mountains by political strife and war), for now he listens innocently, with a 'wild feeling of romantic delight', as Flora sings: 

"  ... the dark hours of night and of slumber are past,
The morn on our mountains is dawning at last;
Glenaladale’s peaks are illumined with the rays,
And the streams of Glenfinnan leap bright in the blaze..."

Watermeadows at Salisbury

John Constable,  Landscape with goatherd and goats, 1823

Source for all images: Wikimedia Commons

The V&A's Constable: The Making of Master exhibition provides a fascinating survey of the way Constable was influenced by other artists throughout his career.  He admired the early Gainsborough and it is easy to see why: the Landscape with Pool (1745-6) which Constable would have seen in Ipswich is absolutely exquisite.  Rubens was another stimulus: Constable's Moonlit Landscape with Hadleigh Castle uses effects he took from Rubens' Landscape by Moonlight.  I was fascinated by another Rubens in the show, Summer, with its sunlit plain and turquoise distances (Mrs Plinius dismissed it as "garish").  Also on display are direct copies of seventeenth century masters - the 'facsimile' of a Claude painting (above), and the version (below) of a Ruisdael winter scene owned by Sir Robert Peel, who insisted that Constable include a small dog to distinguish it from the original (I wonder which version is worth more now?)  This added dog inevitably reminded me of the cruise missiles inserted by Peter Kennard into his 1980 version of Constable's The Haywain, a work now owned by the Tate.

John Constable, A winter landscape with figures on a path,

a footbridge and windmills beyond, 1832

  Inscribed on the stretcher 'Copied from the Original Picture by Ruisdael in the possession of Sir Robt Peel Bt by me John Constable RA at Hampstead Sep. 1832 P.S. color (...) Dog added (...) only (...) Size of the Original (...) and Showed this pictures to Dear John Dunthrone Octr 30 1832 (...) this was the last time I (...)' and further inscribed 'Poor J Dunthorne died on Friday (all Saints) the 2d of November. 1832-at 4 o clock in the afternoon Aged 34 years.'

Constable was also interested in the methods and advice of earlier artists.  The exhibition juxtaposes Twenty Studies of Skies after Alexander Cozens (1823) with a copy of Cozens' own examples.  Constable drew these at Coleorton Hall, home of the great collector Sir George Beaumont, where (as I read on the NGA site) Constable 'also studied Cozens’s list of twenty-seven types of ‘Circumstance’ in nature, consisting of accidents (wind, rain, storm etc.), seasons (spring, autumn etc.) and characters (time of day such as ‘rising-sun’, ‘setting-sun’, and ‘close of day’'.  There is something both seductive and reductive about the idea that landscape can be classified in this way, like the tags used to label internet images.  Constable also took heed of Leonardo's advice on a means of achieving accurate perspective whilst out sketching directly from nature, a method demonstrated in this exhibition with a drawing for Watermeadows at Salisbury.

'Take a glass as large as your paper, fasten it well between your eye and the object you mean to draw, and fixing your head in a frame (in such a manner as not to be able to move it) at the distance of two feet from the glass; shut one eye, and draw with a pencil accurately upon the glass all that you see through it. After that, trace upon paper what you have drawn on the glass, which tracing you may paint at pleasure, observing the aerial perspective.' - Leonardo da Vinci - A Treatise on Painting

John Constable, Watermeadows at Salisbury, 1820 or 1829

The most interesting room in this excellent exhibition is the least colourful, devoted to Constable's collection of prints.  As the curators explain, over his career Constable amassed '59 oil paintings by ‘Old and Modern Masters’ and over 5000 prints, 250 drawings, 37 books of prints and 39 framed prints and drawings.'  This enthusiasm reminds me of Van Gogh, whose letters vividly convey his pleasure in acquiring prints (and also photographic reproductions, an option not yet available to Constable).  The small selection of Constable's collection displayed at the V&A amounts to a history of Western landscape art in its diverse forms: Dürer, Titian, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Rosa, Waterloo.  It was only a few years ago that I too would need to have owned a reproduction of one of these images to study it here in the comfort of my home.  Now they are available to me instantly wherever my phone can get a signal.

Google Image Search: Rembrandt's The Three Trees (1643),

an etching owned by Constable.

Postscript

Earlier this week, at the LRB bookshop event mentioned in my last post, I met Chris from pastoral punk duo Way Through, who told me that they had been in Constable Country this summer for a Field Broadcast project called Scene on a Navigable River.  As part of this they reworked the track 'Dedham Vale' which appeared on their 2013 album Clapper Is Still.  Field Broadcast is 'a live digital broadcasting platform led by artists Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. After downloading a special Field Broadcast app, the software waits quietly until the artist’s work is ready for transmission, when a live video stream opens unannounced on the recipient’s computer, tablet or mobile phone desktop.'  I am now imagining what would have happened if Way Through's dissonant music had suddenly activated while I was in an important meeting - I suppose this element of surprise is a way of countering the sheer availability of art online.  Two hundred years ago there was only Constable, leaving his room full of prints to walk out into the landscape his paintings were in the process of 'creating' for us.  He could reproduce an old painting but in working from nature he held up a small screen of glass the size of a modern tablet device and tried to trace what he could see.  'When I sit down to make a sketch from nature,' he wrote, 'the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.' 

John Constable, Dedham Vale, 1802 

How gloomily glaring!

'The Claude Glass was an optical device which took various forms, of which perhaps Thomas Gray's was the most typical: 'a Plano-convex Mirror of about for inches diameter on a black foil, and bound up like a pocket-book.'  The convexity miniaturised the reflected landscape.  Except in the foreground, details were largely lost, and something like a beau ideal emerged, freed from particularities and deformities. [...] Its 'complex view' helped the apprentice painter; and, for the non-painting tourist, its darker tinting and distortion helped to superimpose something like a Claudean idiom on British landscape.' - Malcolm Andrews The Search for the Picturesque

 

Claude Glasses in The Science Museum

I have been reading Arnaud Maillet's The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art.  It originally appeared in France in an edition of just a hundred copies, but was translated and published as a Zone Book at the instigation of Jonathan Crary (whose Techniques of the Observer has been a key text in visual studies).  That small initial print run may reflect the surprising fact that, according to Maillet, 'in France, these instruments are virtually unknown, even by art historians'; whilst it is relatively easy to see them on show here (e.g. in the Science Museum), there are none in French collections.  The scope of Maillet's book goes well beyond the instrument used by Picturesque tourists and artists in the late eighteenth century.  In addition to covering earlier uses of convex mirrors in art, he considers the association of black mirrors with the dark arts and their use in catoptromancy and hypnotism.  He also finds black mirrors in more recent art (Boltanski, Richter, Perrodin) - abstractions and reflective surfaces that call into question what we are seeing - and he explores their association with loss, melancholy and mourning.

John Dee's scrying mirror in The Science Musuem

The term 'Claude Glass' has also been used for another viewing instrument sold to Picturesque tourists: a set of tinted viewing lenses.  These lenses could create the kind of tonal harmony we encounter only rarely in real life - in mist, at sunset or in the smoke of a fire.  Like the filters available now on photographic apps, they allowed the viewer to perceive the landscape in different lights.  For example, 'through the hoar-frost tinted lens, distant corn stooks become snow drifts.  The tourists could rationalise these fancies by claiming that such artifice was, after all, only a means of anticipating what Nature herself would be doing in a few hours' or a few months' time with the same landscape' (Andrews). The leading theorist of the Picturesque, William Gilpin, tried these Claude Glasses while riding in a chaise and saw a dream-like succession of 'high coloured pictures'.  Their usage was easy to satirise though, as Maillet points out, and I will end here with the quotation he uses from James Plumptre's comic opera The Lakers (1797).  Miss Veronica Beccabunga is looking through her 'Claude Lorraine Glasses' at the landscape between Derwent Water and Borrowdale.

'Speedwell, give me my glasses.  Where's my Gray?  (Speedwell gives glasses.)  Oh! Claude and Poussin are nothing.  By the bye, where's my Claude-Lorrain?  I must throw a Gilpin tint over these magic scenes of beauty.  (Looks through the glass.) How gorgeously glowing!  Now for the darker. (Looks through the glass.)  How gloomily glaring!  Now the blue.  (Pretends to shiver cold.)  How frigidly frozen!  What illusions of vision!  The effect is unspeakably interesting.'

Later Miss Beccabunga uses her glasses on her prospective husband.

 'I'll throw a Gilpin tint on him.  (Looks through the glass.)  Yes, he's gorgeously glowing.  I must not view him with the other lights, for a husband should not be either glaringly gloomy, or frigidly frozen; nor should I like to be haunted by a blue devil.'

Like a crystal flood

The story of Acis and Galatea is rooted in the landscape of Sicily.  When the sea-nymph sees her lover killed by a great rock, thrown by the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, she transforms his blood into the river Acis. Polyphemus tries to lure Galatea away from the sea with descriptions of life on the island.  'Here there are bays, and here slender cypresses, / Here is sombre ivy, and here the vine's sweet fruit / Here there is ice-cold water which dense-wooded Etna / Sends from its snows - a drink fit for the gods.'  These lines are given him by Theocritus in Idyll 11 (trans Anthony Verity), whilst in Virgil's ninth Eclogue the Cyclops tells her 'Coloured spring is here.  The river banks are spangled / with flowers of many hues.  Above my grotto a silvery / Poplar sways, and vines cast a shifting lace of shadow.' (trans. C. Day Lewis).

Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus, 1648

Landscape imagery is used in a different way in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Polyphemus climbs to the apex of a hill on a spur jutting out into the sea and sings in praise of Galatea, listing her qualities in terms of the beauties of nature.  She is

whiter than the snowy columbine

a sweeter flower than any in the meadows 

taller and more stately than alder

more radiant than crystal

friskier than a tender kid

smoother than shells polished by the sea

more welcome than sun in winter or summer shade

more choice than apples

lovelier to see than the tall plane trees

more sparkling than ice

sweeter than ripe grapes

softer than swansdown or creamy cheese

fairer than a watered garden

But also

wilder than an untamed heifer

harder than an ancient oak

more treacherous than the sea

tougher than willow-twigs or white vine branches

as immovable as the rocks

more turbulent than a river

vainer than the much-praised peacock

fiercer than fire

harsher than harrows

more truculent than a pregnant bear

deafer than the waters

crueler than a trodden snake

What Polyphemus most regrets however, is her ability to outrun him, for she is 'swifter than the deer, driven by loud barking, swifter even than the winds, and the passing breeze'.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657

As you can see above, Claude and Poussin both based beautiful paintings on the myth, one a view looking out to sea, the other looking back into the island's rocky interior.  Acis and Galatea are small figures in the foreground and Polyphemus is barely distinguishable from the landscape.  In Poussin's painting his back merges into the rocks where he sits, turned away from the lovers, playing his flute.  In Claude's, the Cyclops is barely visible - you can just glimpse him (right) sadly watching from the wooded slope, his view of the lovers obscured by the sheet they have put up to afford them some privacy.  Of course not all artists put emphasis on the landscape and Poussin himself did a version with additional cherubs and embracing lovers in which Polyphemus looks on like the sad guy at a particularly riotous party.

It was at a hunting party that Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera Acis et Galatée saw its first performance in 1686.  Elaborate artificial sets of the kind he had previously specialised in were no longer an option now that he was out of favour with Louis XIV (who had become increasingly religious and less tolerant of Lully's openly homosexual lifestyle).  It is tempting to imagine this being successfully performed with very little scenery, perhaps even outside amid 'natural' scenery.  After Lully there are a few more steps in the operatic story before we get to Handel's Acis and Galatea.  There was an English version by John Eccles and P.A. Motteux in 1701, which depressingly included 'a subplot concerned with the quarrel of rustic couple Roger and Joan, introduced to “make the piece the more dramatical.”'  Then came Giovanni Bononcini's Polyfemo (1702) and an Italian version by the young Handel himself, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708).  Ten years later Handel had moved to England and was employed by James Brydges, 9th Baron Chandos, the 'Apollo of the Arts', and it was for him that Acis and Galatea, was composed, with a libretto by John Gay (aided by two more poets, John Hughes and Alexander Pope).

Acis and Galatea was first performed on a summer's day at Cannons, the house Brydges was then still building at vast expense (and which would be razed to the ground in 1747 when the family fortune gave out).   Pleasingly this does seem to have taken place in the open air, although The Grove Book of Operas is a bit sniffy about this 'local tradition', remarking that the discovery of piping to supply an old fountain "might fancifully be invoked as support".  If true, the audience would have been within earshot of the water features designed by John Theophilus Deaguliers, another remarkable individual patronised by Brydges, who combined the roles of local priest and hydraulic engineer.  Perhaps the sound of water would have been a constant reminder of Galatea, the sea nymph loved by both Acis and Polyphemus. At the end of the opera, as you can hear in the clip embedded below, when Galatea transforms Acis into a river, she sings

Heart, the seat of soft delight,
Be thou now a fountain bright!
Purple be no more thy blood,
Glide thou like a crystal flood.
Rock, thy hollow womb disclose!
The bubbling fountain, lo! it flows;
Through the plains he joys to rove,
Murm'ring still his gentle love.

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire

"In a crowd, he that talks loudest, not he that talks best, is surest of commanding attention; and in an art exhibition, he that does not attract the eye, does nothing."  This was the regrettable conclusion of John Opie, Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy (1805-09), who urged artists to paint '"for eternity," not for fashion and the contemporary acclaim of corrupt and incompetent judges"' (Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter).  Kriz notes that 'such practices may have prompted changes in the exhibition sites themselves.  In 1807 a commentator on the state of the arts, writing in the short lived Beau Monde, speculated that the (much-hated) red walls of the new British Gallery might serve "perhaps as a precaution against too vivid colours, which a desire of attracting notice has introduced into the school of painting."'  When a few years later John Martin started exhibiting those spectacular paintings that were on show at Tate Britain earlier this year, the Royal Academy were not impressed (but still found it convenient to promote Francis Danby as a poential rival to Martin).  One of the best known art stories from this period involves Turner turning up to add a bright red buoy to the foreground of his seascape, Helvoetsluys, so as to attract attention away from Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge.  "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired a gun."

Three years ago I went to the Royal Academy to see Anish Kapoor's gun firing brightly coloured red wax at the gallery wall.  Last weekend I was back, with the whole family, for another contemporary art spectacle, David Hockney's A Bigger Picture.  This new exhibition was inspired by the success of his Bigger Trees Near Warter (40ft by 15ft) at the 2007 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (see Richard Dorment's Telegraph review: 'Hockney shows that biggest is best.')  My expectations were relatively low, based on what I had seen in 2007, when Tate Britain showed some of Hockney's East Yorkshire landscapes along with his selection of Turner paintings.  But overall I enjoyed the exhibition, having stopped worrying about the quality of individual works and begun to view it more as a set of huge installations documenting a kind of postmodern performance of painting en plein air.  For Hockney this now involves iPad sketches, blown up here to about sixty times their original size, and whilst it's true that as Laura Cumming says, they 'appear inert and dehumanised', perhaps that's partly the point.  They depict The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) and comprise a 52-part work, wallpapering the gallery in a bright computer-screen colours.  According to the RA there is 'a deliberate sense of theatricality ... the viewer is placed centre-stage with the drama of the approaching spring played out on all sides.'  It is the kind of theatricality that was criticised in the sixties by advocates of Modernism like Michael Fried, but, like John Opie a century and a half earlier, they were swimming against the tide.

Rosalind Krauss, in her essay 'Grids' (1979), argued that grids 'declare the modernity of modern art'; they are 'what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.'  In the grids that make up Hockney's landscapes he reintroduces a stylised version of nature, patterns and bright colours that reference artists from the early days of Modernism (Van Gogh, Vuillard, Vlaminck).  In her review, Laura Cumming complains of 'a neutralising tidiness. It isn't just those regular blocks into which the big works are split for ease of construction; it isn't even the superlatively concise draughtsmanship that underpins every image. It is a kind of graphic fastidiousness – nothing too out of place or too wild – bordering on neatness. Can Yorkshire be like that these days?'  Not according to The Telegraph: 'there are calls for the area to be cleaned up before it becomes a major tourist trail.One visitor said: "A tourist trap was mentioned but hopefully not in its present state. We travelled the whole length of Woldgate recently and the whole route was an eyesore. "The woods and copses were more like tips – strewn with abandoned household items. The hedgerows were littered with plastic and paper. It's fly-tipping on an almost industrial scale."'  

 

There has already been a huge amount written about the exhibition online, but I've noticed that some reviewers omit to mention the room devoted to Hockney's versions of a landscape by Claude, The Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656). These come as a bit of a surprise, hung between all those images of the arrival of spring in Woldgate and a darkened seating area where you can experience the Yorkshire Wolds through two grids of video screens, showing footage taken from the bonnet of Hockney's jeep.  Charles Darwent in The Independent could 'see why Hockney would be fascinated by Claude Lorrain, who, like him, invented a light that was more real than real. But his computer-cleaned takes on Claude's Sermon on the Mount are just appalling: it is as well that the dead cannot sue.'  Brian Sewell in The Evening Standard complained that 'Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master' and described Hockney's engagement with The Sermon on the Mount as 'a sickening impertinence, contemptible.'  I would agree that he doesn't seem very reverential: you can't help thinking that Hockney's figures (elongated like Claude's) are climbing the Mount in order to dive into the swimming pool coloured sea beyond.  In an article for The Economist Karen Wright recounts her meetings with David Hockney over the last few years and recalls being shown his vast painting after Claude as a work-in-progress. 'It fills the entire wall, about 15ft high and 40ft wide, and the colours are eye-popping: there are fields of jacaranda purple in the background, and the sea has been lightened to a soft, milky, opalescent blue. ... As we leave the “Sermon” behind, he says, “I have named it ‘The Bigger Message’,” and he laughs uproariously.'

Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia

The Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Claude: The Enchanted Landscape, which I looked round yesterday, provides a good opportunity to compare the artist's drawings and sketches.  A preparatory sketch for Claude's last painting, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, shows the foreground figures standing out from their background and Ascanius (the son of Aeneas) just left of centre.  Trees, portico and people are all on a more realistic, less monumental scale.  In the painting, as Martin Sonnabend and Jon Whiteley point out in the catalogue, 'everything has been suffused with an air of fantasy.  The hunters are impossibly elongated - Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy - but even they are overwhelmed by the landscape, lit by a silvery sky, which arches over them and recedes far back into the blue, snow-capped hills.'

Claude Lorrain, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was curious to compare the two figures of Ascanius directly and so had a play on Photoshop, as you can see below.  It would seem facile to say this shows Claude could have painted more naturalistic figures if he'd wanted to, but the point is worthwhile because contemporaries criticised this aspect of his painting and Claude himself reportedly joked that when he sold his landscapes he threw the figures in for nothing.  Of course the figures in Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia can't be seen in isolation (or cut out from their setting); the painting's harmonius colours and soaring forms combine to convey a legendary time and place, dreamed from the poetry of Virgil.  Goethe summed up the nature of landscapes like this in 1829, when he said that Claude's paintings 'possess the highest truth, but no trace of reality.' 

Landscape with a Natural Arch and Waterfall

Claude Lorrain, Perseus and the Discovery of Coral, c1671

(preparatory drawing for the Holkham Hall painting,
Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In Helen Langdon's catalogue for last year's Salvator Rosa exhibition she refers in her notes on his painting Landscape with a Natural Arch and Waterfall to the art history of a specific landform, the rocky arch.  These were painted more frequently after 1626, when an ancient Roman landscape painting with a rocky arch was discovered in a nymphaeum near the Barberini palace.  It was a favourite motif of Rosa's - either inland, as in the Detroit Finding of Moses, or by the sea, as in the Doria Pamphilj's Coastal Scene. In the Palazzo Pitti's Landscape with a Bridge the form of the rocky arch is echoed below by the arches of a crumbling bridge.  Peering at small online images of picturesque landscapes, as I have just been doing, it is sometimes hard to distinguish ruined architecture from natural rock formations.  Both feature in the work of Northern artists working in Italy in the seventeenth century, like Paul Bril and Jan Breughel I. Rosa was probably influenced by his fellow Neapolitan, Filippo Napoletano, who included the rocky arch in his frescoes for the Palazzo Rospigliosi Pallavicini, and by Claude Lorrain who 'worked numerous variations on it.'  It would be fascinating to write a proper history of rock arches in art, covering these imaginary scenes and later works where artists sought to paint or photgraph real examples, like the cliffs at Etretat.  We have recently had cultural histories of mountains, forests etc. and now I think it is time to focus on particular geographical features... 

Gustave Courbet, La falaise d'Étretat après l'orage, 1870
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine

Peter Paul Rubens, Philemon and Baucis, c1630

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1822 William Hazlitt compared Rubens with Claude: 'I imagine that Rubens's landscapes are picturesque: Claude's are ideal. Rubens is always in extremes; Claude in the middle. Rubens carries some one peculiar quality or feature of nature to the utmost verge of probability: Claude balances and harmonises different forms and masses with laboured delicacy, so that nothing falls short, no one thing overpowers another. Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine, moonlight, are the means with which Rubens produces his most gorgeous and enchanting effects: there are neither rainbows, nor showers, nor sudden bursts of sunshine, nor glittering moonbeams in Claude. He is all softness and proportion: the other is all spirit and brilliant excess. The two sides (for example) of one of Claude's landscapes balance one another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several objects are grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness. Claude has more repose: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance.'

Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657

Source: Wikimedia Commons

According to Kenneth Clark, 'no great painter ever lived so completely within his resources as Claude.  Unlike such prodigals as Rubens, his pictures always suggest a tactful and far-sighted economy.'  In Landscape into Art, Clark praises the earlier writing on Claude of Hazlitt and of Roger Fry, whose essay on the artist appeared in the Burlington Magazine in 1907.  Fry also praised Claude (rather faintly), whilst comparing him with more vital, colourful artists and writers.  For example, he says that 'Robert Bridges, in his essay on Keats, very aptly describes for literature the kind of beauty which we find in Shakespeare : "the power of concentrating all the far-reaching resources of language on one point, so that a single and apparently effortless expression rejoices the aesthetic imagination at the moment when it is most expectant and exacting." That, ceteris paribus, applies admirably to certain kinds of design. It corresponds to the nervous touch of a Pollajuolo or a Rembrandt. But Claude's line is almost nerveless and dull. Even when it is most rapid and free it never surprises us by any intimate revelation of character, any summary indications of the central truth. But it has a certain inexpressive beauty of its own. It is never elegant, never florid, and, above all, never has any ostentation of cleverness.'