Architecton is good on the life cycle of stone, from quarrying, to building to destruction, but its structure is confusing - you only really understand where in the world the rockfall happened towards the end. A prologue shot in Ukraine feels a bit tacked on. Personally I didn’t care for the music or some of the black and white footage. However, I did warm to the film's central figure, an amiable old Italian architect-designer called Michele De Lucchi. He wanders round Baalbek's Roman ruins, admiring the lovely old stone (no ugly concrete) and marveling at how they cut it with such precision. Back at his idyllic-looking family home in Italy, we see him direct two workmen to build a circular stone garden feature. You worry he is going to catch pneumonia standing out in the snow while it takes shape, although maybe this inclement day was chosen by the director. The result is reminiscent of a Richard Long circle and it becomes clear he aims to let the interior grow naturally, like herman de vries's meadow. In Peter Bradshaw's review he says that despite some faults, the film 'is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.'
Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology edited by Todd Andrew Borlik was published last year and so far has a solitary one star review on Amazon. "Frankly,
if a book of out-of-copyright texts is THAT expensive, you may as well
download the contents list to Kindle and go and find the texts yourself.
Absurd pricing." At £84, it is certainly out of reach of my pocket, but as this reviewer notes, the contents list is freely available. Here are two sections:
In this post I wanted to highlight the first text above, Robert Southwell's poem 'A Vale of Tears'. Here are its first four stanzas:
A vale there is, enwrapt with dreadful shades,
Which thick of mourning pines shrouds from the sun,
Where hanging cliffs yield short and dumpish glades,
And snowy flood with broken streams doth run.
Where eye-room is from rock to cloudy sky,
From thence to dales with stony ruins strew'd,
Then to the crushèd water's frothy fry,
Which tumbleth from the tops where snow is thaw'd.
Where ears of other sound can have no choice,
But various blust'ring of the stubborn wind
In trees, in caves, in straits with divers noise;
Which now doth hiss, now howl, now roar by kind.
Where waters wrestle with encount'ring stones,
That break their streams, and turn them into foam,
The hollow clouds full fraught with thund'ring groans,
With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant womb.
It is certainly a pretty bleak-sounding place, where pleasant landscape features we associate with pastoral poetry provide no comfort ('crystal springs crept out of secret vein, / Straight find some envious hole that hides their grace'). Surrounded by all this, the mind turns inward and dwells on sin and the need for repentance. 'Come, deep remorse,' the poet concludes, 'possess my sinful breast; / Delights, adieu! I harbour'd you too long.'
Robert Southwell was a Jesuit Catholic martyr: canonised in 1970; hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1595. A recent profile of him in The Tabletdescribes his training in France and Rome and return to England in 1586 to undertake clandestine missionary work.
'Southwell’s literature infiltrated the Catholic
country houses of England. Though he was a priest without a pulpit and
an outlaw, Southwell hoped that word of a Catholic revival would
disseminate through the secret printing presses to the peasantry,
yeomanry, and lesser gentry. [...] His great poem “A vale of teares”, issued in the year of his death,
likens England’s perceived fallen state under Elizabeth I to a “dumpish”
(melancholy) wasteland, “Where nothing seemed wronge yet nothing
right”. In the absence of a settled spiritual solution to England’s
break from Rome, the poem offered Catholics a negative solace.'
In a 2018 article, Gary Bouchard cites critics who have explained the poem in terms of a prescribed Ignatian penitential framework or in psychological terms as a 'therapeutic scene'. His own view is that it can be read as an anti-pastoral, contrasting it
specifically with Spenser's 'The Shepheard's Calender' (1579). But he also notes that some of the language and imagery is proto-Romantic - a landscape one could imagine 'Victor Frankenstein and his creature passing through'. Southwell had crossed the Alps via the St. Gotthard Pass on his journey to Rome in 1578 and would have seen sights that later writers and artists would come to admire for their sublimity.
J. M. W. Turner, A Ravine in the Pass of St Gotthard, 1802
I will close here with one more stanza from the poem:
The pines thick set, high grown and ever green,
Still clothe the place with sad and mourning veil;
Here gaping cliff, there mossy plain is seen,
Here hope doth spring, and there again doth quail.
Reading Robert Southwell's poem prompts the obvious thought that in these dark times - of climate crisis, global pandemic, economic hardship and racist brutality - it is hard not to feel that we are all walking through a vale of tears.
In a recent clear-out my mother passed on to me this 1950 publication on Constable. At first I took it to be an exhibition catalogue but it is actually a short booklet concerning the V&A's superb collection of Constables, based on a gift made by the artist's daughter in 1888. There are thirty-three black and white reproductions - I've included one of the paintings featured below. The book cost one shilling and a note in the back says that copies 'may be had from the Victoria and Albert Museum bookstall and from H.M. Stationery Office...' I've always read this as 'Her Majesty's' but of course in 1950 it would have been His Majesty's Stationery Office. In the United States of America it could be obtained 'from the British Information Services, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York.' The publication is 'Small Picture Book No. 23' - a quick search online reveals other V&A titles in this series covering, for example Adam Silver (no. 35), English Chintz (No. 22), Toys (No. 63), English Prehistoric Pottery (No. 28) and Glass Table-Ware (No. 1).
John Constable, Study for The Leaping Horse, c. 1825
The paintings in the book are preceded by a wonderful series of quotes, many of which will be very familiar to those with an interest in Constable (some have been used on this blog in the past). Here are ten of them
"The landscape painter must walk in the fields with an humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see nature in her beauty."
"The world is wide; no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.'
"Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness; not one of which has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world."
"I never did admire the Autumnal tints, even in nature, so little of a painter am I in the eye of commonplace connoisseurship. I love the exhilarating freshness of Spring."
"The landscape of Gainsborough is soothing, tender and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of the morning are all to be found on the canvases of this most benevolent and kind-hearted man. On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them."
J. M. W. Turner, The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl, 1823
"Turner is stark mad with ability. The picture (the Bay of Baiae) seems painted with saffron and indigo."
"Brightness was the characteristic excellence of Claude; brightness, independent on colour, for what colour is there here?" (holding up a glass of water).
"What were the habits of Claude and the Poussins? Though surrounded with palaces filled with pictures, they made the fields their chief places of study."
"... some 'high-minded' members [of the Royal Academy] who stickel for the 'elevated and noble' walks of art - i.e. preferring the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of Landscape."
"I have seen an affecting picture this morning by Ruysdael; it haunts my mind and clings to my heart, and stands between you and me while I am talking to you; it is a water-mill; a man and boy are cutting rushes in the running stream (the tail-water); the whole so true, clean, and fresh, and as brisk as champagne; a shower has not long passed."
Katie Paterson, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, 2010
Photography was permitted: this is my photograph of her photograph
We recently took the train down to Margate to see the exhibitionA place that exists only in moonlight: Katie Paterson & J.M.W. Turner. I last mentioned Paterson's work here nearly ten years ago when I saw her talk at a conference:
She described a work completed only last week,Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand, which
had involved returning to the Sahara desert a grain of sand that had
been chiseled to 0.00005mm using the techniques of nanotechnology. At
extreme magnification the grain of sand resembled a planet and
presumably the chiseling process could have created some nano-land art -
a microscopic Spiral Jetty or near invisible Double Negative.
The point was made (by Brian Dillon) that she brings a necessary sense
of humour to art that deals with cosmic scales of space and time.
As can be seen above, the Turner Contemporary exhibition included a large black and white photograph of this work, showing the artist returning her tiny artwork to the desert.
Most of Paterson's work has been on a cosmic or planetary scale and therefore doesn't really qualify as landscape art. For example,
Fossil Necklace (2013), my favourite piece in the show, in which time is considered as a circle of beads, charting the evolution of life on earth from its monocellular origins. You can view every bead individually on the artist's website.
Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007), where Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was translated into Morse code and sent to the Moon and back. Craters on the moon fragmented the signal, leaving gaps in the music.
The Cosmic Spectrum (2019), a colour wheel designed to show the colour of the universe at each point in its development (the exhibit was broken and didn't rotate when we were there, but this might have made it easier for us to study it). It resembles Olafur Eliasson's Turner Colour Experiments, shown at the Tate in 2014 (see my earlier post).
Turner's work was interspersed with Paterson's and included some marvellous studies inspired by light, such as Moonlight on the River(1826)and ? Boats at Sea (c. 1830-45), both from the Tate's collection.
J. M. W. Turner, Moonlight on the River, 1826
J. M. W. Turner, ? Boats at Sea, c. 1830-45
There is also a new book, A place that exists only in moonlight, published to coincide with the exhibition but oddly not on sale at the gallery itself (you have to send off for it and I have not (yet) done this). It comprises short texts that describe artworks that can exist only in the imagination. Some were placed on the wall, like the one below, which reads like a landscape haiku. These reminded me of the work of her fellow Scottish artist-poets Thomas A. Clark and Alec Finlay. As instructions for art projects, they are like the walking proposals of Richard Long, or indeed any of those texts of conceptual artists, writers and composers who have been interested in exploring space and time, light and substance. Just one example that springs to mind as I write this: La Monte Young's Composition 1960 #15: 'This piece is little whirlpools out in the middle of the ocean.' Someone could compile an anthology of such works, although they would probably seem less inspiring out of context. Among the 'Ideas' on Katie Paterson's website, I particularly like A beach made with dust from spiral galaxies, Gravity released one unit at a time and, of course, A place that exists only in moonlight.
In British Art: Ancient Landscapes, a catalogue published last year for an exhibition at The Salisbury Museum, Sam Smiles describes the history of artistic engagement with Britain's ancient stone circles and chalk figures. It goes roughly as follows:
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrations to accompany the writings of early antiquarians like William Stukeley. The first known painting was by a Flemish artist, Lucas de Heere.
From the mid eighteenth century, topographical engravings and watercolours by artists like Thomas Hearne and Samual Prout.
Romantic era paintings of Celtic bards and druids, along with the stone circles in William Blake's vision of Albion.
William Blake, Milton: a Poem, c. 1811
"All things begin & end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore:
But now the Starry Heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion."
Also at this time, dramatically composed paintings of Stonehenge with Sublime, stormy skies by the great figures in British landscape art: Girtin, Turner, Constable.
Then relatively few Victorian paintings, but a revival of interest among the Neo-Romantics - Paul Nash, John Piper, Henry Moore - who drew on Surrealism, Primitivism and abstract art, but also took an interest in the findings of twentieth century archaeology.
In the inter-war years, sights like Stonehenge, The Long Man of Wilmington were celebrated in Shell posters and their strong, simple forms made them ideal subjects for prints and watercolours by contemporary artists like Eric Ravilious.
After the war attention turned to urban subjects but there was a revivial of interest in the late sixties and new forms of engaging with the monuments: the walks of Richard Long, Derek Jarman's film, Journey to Avebury.
Finally, the present day, and it is surprising that the exhibition couldn't find more recent artworks shaped by psychogeography, hauntology and modern antiquarianism. The story currently ends with Jeremy Deller, whose bouncy Stonehenge I featured here back in 2012.
John Constable, Stonehenge, 1835
Postscript 27/12/17
After putting a link to this post on Twitter, the excellent @BL_prints alerted me to a Sam Smiles piece on their blog, which tells the story above up to the early nineteenth century. Here's a brief extract for you, his final two paragraphs, with an image from the BL website.
The aesthetic presentation of prehistoric structures was most
successful when their massiveness and monumentality was heightened by
the artist’s approach. The topographer John Britton recruited very
capable artists to illustrate his numerous publications: the title page
of the third volume of his survey The Beauties of Wiltshire
(1825) includes an engraving of 1812, based on a drawing by John Sell
Cotman. The subject is the cromlech on Marlborough Downs known as the
Devil’s Den and the impact of the image relies on close focus, a low
horizon and a stormy sky.
This tendency to exaggerate the sublimity associated with these
monuments, concentrating on their enigmatic, even weird presence in the
landscape, ran the risk of removing them from topography completely. The
key instance of this approach is probably JMW Turner’s watercolour of Stonehenge, engraved in 1829 for Charles Heath’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1827–38).
Turner had visited the site at least twice, in 1799 and 1811, and had
studied it carefully. His watercolour, however, sacrifices detail for
theatrical effect as Stonehenge becomes the setting for a spectacular
thunderstorm, with sheep killed by lightning, their shepherd struck down
and his dog howling at the sky. Here, then, topography’s ideal of the
accurate record surrenders almost completely to the artistic impulse.
Anon (once attributed to Guo Xi), Mount Emei under Heavy Snow, 17th century
Mount Omei, or Emei, in Sichuan province, is one of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China and has often featured in Chinese poetry. Li Po spent the early part of his life (before 725) in Sichuan and wrote a 'Song of Mount Omei's Moon', that would later be quoted by Su Shi in one of his own poems. Su Shi was actually born near the foot of the mountain, in 1037, but spent his life being moved from one post to another, getting further and further away until he eventually found himself living on the island of Hainan (he died, back on the mainland, four years later). Fan Ch'eng-ta, one of the 'Four Masters of Southern Sung Poetry', specialising in the field-and-gardens genre, described Mount Emei in his Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (1177). The higher he got, the colder it was - intensely so at night. Reaching Brilliant Cliff he looked down into the clouds and glimpsed halos of coloured light. Further on he could see the mountain range that stretches West, until it eventually becomes the Himalayas:
'Lofty, rugged, carved, sliced; scores, perhaps a hundred peaks in all. When the rising sun first illuminates them, the snow glistens like shiny silver, shimmering in the light of the dawn. From antiquity to the present, this snow has never melted. These mountains extend all the way to the land of India and to tributary kingdoms along the border for a distance of I don't know how many thousands of li. It looks like it is spread out on a table before one. This spectacular, unique, unsurpassable view was truly the crowning one of my entire life.'
Last month I was surprised to encounter a fragment of Mt Emei, perched on the summit of a mountain in Switzerland. This 8 ton lump of basalt, the Emei Stone, was installed on the top of Mt. Rigi in 2015, a year after a Rigi Stone was 'inagurated' on Mt Emei. They are meant to 'symbolise the cultural and touristic collaboration' between the two mountains. An explanatory board refers to these landscapes like global corporations, with the exchange symbolising 'the valuable and long-standing partnership between RIGI and EMEI.' I had not been to Switzerland for a while and was surprised by the number of Chinese tour groups. There are visitors too from other parts of Asia. At the bottom of Mount Titlis, a high, snow-capped peak near Rigi, you encounter the inviting smell of Indian street food on sale at the Spice Bistro. And at its summit, you can take a selfie with cardboard cutout stars of the famous Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which was set in Switzerland (though not actually on Titlis). The appeal of the Alps for Bollywood directors is discussed in an article for The Smithsonian and the Indian fascination with Switzerland is explored in an interestingpieceby Anuradha Vikram's for Hyperallergic.
Mount Rigi became a major tourist destination in the nineteenth century, in part because it is easy to get to from Lucerne. A Telegrapharticle on this phenomenon made the connection with Turner's Blue Rigi, a centrepiece of the Tate's 2014 Late Turner show (looking back I see I wrote at the time about Turner's Italian landscapes rather than the exhibition's views of the Alps). Rigi developed a special appeal, and
'so great was this charisma, that within a couple of decades of Turner’s
visit, a stay in Lucerne and an ascent of The Rigi were among the most
desirable experiences for any traveller to Continental Europe. In 1857 the first grand hotel opened at the summit, and by 1860 there
were 1,000 horses and numerous guides and sedan chairs stationed at the
foot of the mountain in Weggis. The highlight of Thomas Cook’s first
group tour to Switzerland, in 1863, was an ascent of The Rigi to watch
the sunrise, and in 1868 Queen Victoria herself came here, to be carried
up to the hotel in a chair, and woken before dawn for the same view.
J.M.W. Turner, The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, c. 1841-42
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Mount Emei has a much longer tradition of tourism than Mount Rigi, centred on its temples and the 'silver world' - a sea of clouds - visible from its summit. In the Qing Dynasty, the poet Tan Zhongyue named ten scenic attractions, including 'Blue Sky After Snowfall on the Great Plateau', 'Crystal Waters and Autumn Winds', and 'Felicitous Light on the Golden Summit'. Today, the UNESCO World Heritage site acknowledges the threat posed by visitor numbers ('there are numerous drink stands
and souvenir stalls which detract from the natural atmosphere of the
mountain'), but also notes that 'as a sacred place, Mount Emei has benefited from a long-standing and traditional regime of conservation and restoration.'
A thousand years ago, back in the Song Synasty, Fan Ch'eng-ta's does not mention encountering any other sight-seers. Perhaps he had the view to himself. Turner never tried making the ascent of Rigi, possibly put off by the prospect of tourists. In J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind, John Gage suggests that 'it may be that he felt the Rigi was already too popular a vantage point, and he did not want to share his experiences with the two or three hundred other tourists who were said to congregate daily on the summit for the dawn.' Gage quotes an earlier traveller, Henry Matthews, who did make the ascent and what he saw is reminiscent of Fan Ch'eng-ta's vision of dawn on Mt. Emei. Matthews found it a 'magnificent spectacle' and concluded that experiencing a sunrise on Rigi 'forms an epoch in one's life, which can never be forgotten.'
J. M. W. Turner, The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of Hasle, Switzerland, 1804
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Turner painted the Reichenbach Falls before they became famous as the setting for Sherlock Holmes' apparent death at the hands of Professor Moriarty. But to what extent were they 'famous' already, before Conan Doyle visited the falls in 1893, or even before Turner arrived in 1802? The Tate has a sketch by Turner made earlier, in the mid 1790s, after a painting by John Robert Cozens. The Tour through Switzerland made in 1776 by connoisseur Richard Payne Knight, accompanied by Cozens, influenced later itineraries and it was around this time that the Reichenbach Falls became a destination for early Alpine tourists. In Leslie Stephen's book on the Alps, The Playground of Europe, he refers to the way geographical features become cultural destinations. Looking back to geologist Gottlieb Sigmund Gruner's Die Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes (1760) he notes that the Reichenbach Falls had already become an 'object of interest', separated off from the surrounding landscape, whereas the Rigi (a mountain now particularly associated with Turner) was still a mere 'phenomenon of nature'.
We visited the Reichenbach Falls on a misty day last month and, as you can see from my photographs, it is still an impressive landmark. Here is Conan Doyle's description in 'The Final Problem'.
It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow,
plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the
smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself
is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing
into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over
and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of
green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of
spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl
and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the
breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to
the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the
abyss.
The Reichenbach Falls can easily be reached from the village of Meiringen (although to keep Dr Watson away from the action, Conan Doyle made the distance further). There in the village, next to the Sherlock Holmes museum, Leslie Stephen is commemorated in a dramatic statue. He looks full of energy, very different from how I usually think of him, as Virginia Woolf's bearded Victorian father, the model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Up at the falls there is a plaque, put up in 1991, commemorating the centenary of Holmes's encounter with Moriarty. It refers to what Conan Doyle later decided had really happened on that narrow path: 'At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.' Thus fiction changes how we experience a landscape. The lure of particular places is often down to their association with stories and myths, but here we can trace the process over the course of just a few years - from the Reichenbach Falls' preexisting fame, which brought Conan Doyle here in the first place, to their dramatic role in an event that shocked the reading public, and then, after Holmes was brought back from the dead, their subsequent fascination as a site of speculation, which shows no signs of dying away.
Turner versus Constable... You can compare the two greatest figures in British landscape art directly in their paintings of the Chain Pier at Brighton - Constable exhibited his at the Royal Academy in 1827 and Turner began work on his a year later. Why did they both tackle this motif? The answer relates to the pier itself which was completed in 1823 to facilitate a new steam packet service: a key investor was the great art patron, Lord Egremont. Constable made a detailed sketch during his first visit to the Brighton in the summer of 1824 - the delay in completing a finished work may have been because he was busy catering for the new market that had opened up in France, following his success at the 1824 Salon. At this time Turner was also at the peak of his fame, but a decade earlier he had fallen out with Egremont, hitherto his greatest supporter. They were reconciled though in 1827 and Turner was invited to stay at Petworth House, where he painted a series of marvellous sketches (I have included one of them here previously). Among the full-scale landscape paintings he completed there is the painting of the pier below, which can still be seen at Petworth. It includes one of the steamboats from Dieppe which Egremont's investment had helped facilitate.
In an essay for the exhibition Constable and Brighton, 'Taking on the Chain Pier - and Turner', Ian Warrell notes that Constable emphasises the traditional fishing trade and omits any reference to the steam packet service, but Turner too partially obscures the steamboat behind a group of fishermen. 'Turner fully accepted, welcomed even, the inevitability of technological progress. But such advances are invariably represented in a way that tugs the emotions for what is passing away, or in danger of being superseded.' Signs of Brighton's rapid urban expansion are evident in Turner's view, in the new buildings stretching along the coast and in the pollution represented by some discarded vegetables floating in the water (bottom right). These vegetables inevitably prompted comment, being at eye-level for diners in Petworth's Carved Room. 'However, rather than disagreeing head-on about the desirability of their presence, the tactful Egremont chose to challenge the likelihood that the vegetables would float (something that was then tested, using real vegetables, in a bath tub.'
John Constable, Rainstorm over the sea, c. 1824-8
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The exhibition includes other paintings of Brighton beach by both artists, such as Constable's dramatic oil sketch of a rainstorm. It also traces the walks Constable made along the coast and onto the Downs, where he sketched the windmills (a particular interest for the son of a mill owner). Brighton Museum have even produced a leaflet 'In Constable's Footsteps' suggesting a walking route. The exhibition itself was prompted by the recent identification of the exact house Constable rented in 1824. A painter who now lives there and who did some of the research into Constable's whereabouts has been given the opportunity to show one of his own paintings in the exhibition (on the evidence of this it was, I think, a wise decision to restrict him to one painting, in contrast to the kind of joint show I mentioned on Saturday in my previous post). Constable's paintbox and gold medal from the 1824 Salon are on display alongside his paintings, and there is also a small toy stage coach which, according to family legend, kept Constable's children amused on the journey down to Brighton. We didn't try taking our own children to this exhibition but I would certainly recommend it, along with the excellent catalogue.
A constant keeping-past of shaken trees,
And a bewildered glitter of loose road;
Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop
Against white sky; and wires—a constant chain—
That seem to draw the clouds along with them
(Things which one stoops against the light to see
Through the low window; shaking by at rest,
Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows);
And, seen through fences or a bridge far off,
Trees that in moving keep their intervals
Still one 'twixt bar and bar; and then at times
Long reaches of green level, where one cow,
Feeding among her fellows that feed on,
Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound.
These lines describe a train journey from London to Folkestone on 27 September 1849. It was the end of a decade of remarkable expansion, when railways had developed from isolated lines to a national network, and the novelty of moving at speed through the countryside is evident in this poetry. Ironically though, the writer - twenty-one-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti - was heading into the past, to see the medieval architecture and paintings of Paris, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp. He was accompanied on the trip by William Holman Hunt and addressed his verse letters home to the recently formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Among these are poems inspired by the places they visited - Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Field of Waterloo etc. - but they are interspersed by accounts of the journey itself and the embodied experience of moving through landscape. Rossetti, as a painter, was also fascinated by the way the carriage windows framed what was visible, and how the railway line itself recomposed its surroundings. The reference in the lines above to wires and clouds reminds me of what I wrote here last week about Fog Lines. I will reproduce a few more examples of this landscape-in-motion poetry here. The full set of poem can be read at the Rossetti Archive.
Having reached Folkestone and sailed the 'the iron-coloured sea' to Boulogne, the travellers took a train to Amiens and thence to Paris.
The sea has left us, but the sun remains.
Sometimes the country spreads aloof in tracts
Smooth from the harvest; sometimes sky and land
Are shut from the square space the window leaves
By a dense crowd of trees, stem behind stem
Passing across each other as we pass:
Sometimes tall poplar-wands stand white, their heads
Outmeasuring the distant hills.
From Paris they made an excursion by train to Versailles.
The wind has ceased, or is a feeble breeze
Warm in the sun. The leaves are not yet dry
From yesterday's dense rain. All, low and high,
A strong green country; but, among its trees,
Ruddy and thin with Autumn. After these
There is the city still before the sky.
Versailles is reached. Pass we the galleries
And seek the gardens...
At the end of their stay in Paris, they took the train to Belgium. Rossetti struggled to sleep (insomnia would plague him in later life) and there were several stops at stations where he looked in some wonder at the train itself. 'The mist of crimson heat / Hangs, a spread glare, about our engine's bulk.' The landscape they passed on this journey was anything but picturesque.
A sky too dull for cloud. A country lain
In fields, where teams drag up the furrow yet;
Or else a level of trees, the furthest ones
Seen like faint clouds at the horizon's point.
Quite a clear distance, though in vapour. Mills
That turn with the dry wind. Large stacks of hay
Made to look bleak. Dead autumn, and no sun.
The smoke upon our course is borne so near
Along the earth, the earth appears to steam.
Blanc-Misseron, the last French station, passed.
We are in Belgium.
J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844
From Brussels they travelled to the old cities of Flanders. In Bruges Rossetti felt himself close to Van Eyck and Memling, listening to the same bells that had rung through the city when they were at work in the fifteenth century (perhaps he was thinking of the passage in Victor Hugo that I quoted earlier this month?) I will end this selection of quotations with lines that refer to the title of Turner's famous painting, first exhibited five years earlier. Writing recently in the LRB, Inigo Thomas says that John Ruskin, the great champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, 'never wrote a word about Rain, Steam and Speed, and he was
never convinced that any train, or any idea of the ‘scientific people’,
as he scornfully described them, was worthy of artistic representation.' In 1849 Ruskin was yet to meet Rossetti and you wonder what he would have made of these railway journey poems. They were only published decades later, two years after Rossetti's death, and given by his brother the rather prosaic title, 'A Trip to Paris and Belgium'.
The country swims with motion. Time itself
Is consciously beside us, and perceived.
Our speed is such the sparks our engine leaves
Are burning after the whole train has passed.
The darkness is a tumult. We tear on,
The roll behind us and the cry before,
Constantly, in a lull of intense speed
And thunder. Any other sound is known
Merely by sight. The shrubs, the trees your eye
Scans for their growth, are far along in haze.
The sky has lost its clouds, and lies away
Oppressively at calm: the moon has failed:
Our speed has set the wind against us. Now
Our engine's heat is fiercer, and flings up
Great glares alongside. Wind and steam and speed
And clamour and the night. We are in Ghent.
Before leaving for our Easter break in Northumberland I had joked about shivering on beaches in a freezing North Sea wind. However, I hadn't appreciated how beautiful the effect of this would be, with a layer of sand swirling constantly across the surface - see my brief clip below. Watching back the video footage I took over the course of a week it sounds as if there was a constant howling gale. In one sequence on Lindisfarne I can be heard saying excitedly to the camera that the birdsong is just as you can hear it on Chris Watson's album, In St Cuthbert's Time, but none of it can be made out above the wind. It was different when we were there though, sitting among the stones on the shore, near the ruins of Lindisfarne Abbey, listening to the cry of the eider duck that is so prominent in the Lencten section of In St Cuthbert's Time. I wrote in an earlier post about hearing these recordings at Durham Cathedral in the quiet of a chapel; on Holy Island we were able to hear these sounds unmediated, carried over the water on the wind.
Earlier this month there was a short programme on the BBC called 'Into the Wind'. It followed Tim Dee as he talked of the ways the wind shapes his experiences of walking and birdwatching. An accompanying piece in the Guardian, 'The Man Who Interviewed the Wind', provoked the inevitable below the line jokes (from which I learnt the meaning of 'Dutch oven' - not a piece of landscape vocabulary that will find its way into Robert Macfarlane's word hoard), but also explains how Tim uses the natural soundscape in his work as a radio producer. 'Turning to record a little minute of the wind lets me experience the
place beyond human talk. On good days, in good places, I can sense
myself joined to a landscape. It is the wind that carries me there.' The programme ends with a dramatic wide-angle view of Tim pointing his microphone towards the vast mudflats of the Wash to record the wind as it surges in from the North Sea.
As Chris Watson pointed out in one of the BBC's Tweets of the Day, the sound of the eider duck is often thought to resemble that of Frankie Howerd. I found myself wondering if Cuthbert ever felt goaded by it - in Bede's Life of St Cuthbert the monks are constantly vigilant against temptation, 'our loins ever girt against the snares of the devil and all temptations'. The sounds on In St Cuthbert's Time give a peaceful impression of monastic life, but perhaps the cries of the seabirds could be a torment to monks in search of spiritual purity. 'How often have the demons tried to cast me headlong from yonder rock,' Cuthbert told visitors to his hermitage on Inner Farne. Although he was an active missionary, his life looks like a series of steps to free himself from the world. After entering the monastery of Melrose as a boy, he eventually joined the priory of Lindisfarne, easily accessible only at low tide, then isolated himself on what is now St Cuthbert's island - an islet next to Lindisfarne also regularly cut off by the sea - before leaving the priory altogether to live as a hermit on the Farne Islands. There the walls of his cell were such that all he could see was the sky, so that 'eyes and thoughts might be kept from wandering.'
A raven brings pig's lard to Cuthbert on Farne
from the Yates Thomson MS of Bede's Life of Cuthbert, c. 1200
We took a boat trip to Inner Farne, the small island where Cuthbert lived as a hermit from 676. It is now managed as a nature reserve by the National Trust and their rangers make do with no running water ("we might smell a bit as we only shower once a week"). Cuthbert, according to Bede, found a well there with the help of God. He also persuaded the birds not to eat his crops and shamed a pair of ravens into bringing him a gift of pig's lard - incidents depicted in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Cuthbert is celebrated now for conserving the eider ducks, instituting one of the first bird protection laws. However, the language of Bede in his Life of St Cuthbert is very much about mastery over nature. In Chapter 21, Cuthbert is aided by the sea itself, which deposits with the tide a length of wood just right for his dwelling. 'It is hardly strange that the rest of creation should obey the wishes and commands of a man who has dedicated himself with complete sincerity to the Lord's service. We, on the other hand, often lose that dominion over creation which is ours by right through neglecting to serve its Creator.'
Guillemots on Inner Farne
The tide times meant that we arrived early on Lindisfarne, before anywhere was open, and so while the others ambled over the beach I tried to do some sketching. Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner both came here within a year of each other at the end of the eighteenth century and drew the interior of the ruined priory. Girtin's crumbling columns were influenced by seeing the way Piranesi had depicted the ruins of Rome. Cuthbert himself must have known more Roman remnants than we see in northern Britain today; in the Life he visits Carlisle and is shown an old Roman fountain set into the city walls. Now the medieval priory, built on the site of the original one that the monks, fleeing the vikings, abandoned in 875, lies exposed to the wind. There is less of it standing than there was when Turner came here in 1797. Girtin's paintings of the priory 'emphasised the fact that it had been untouched by the hand of improvers' (Greg Smith, Thomas Girtin: The Art of Watercolour). In them, and in Turner's drawings, the ground is uneven and overgrown, very different from the green lawns maintained today by English Heritage.
Lindisfarne has a castle, built in 1550, the subject of dramatic paintings by both Girtin and Turner, renovated in Arts and Crafts style by Lutyens. It is now being restored again and is inaccessible, covered in scaffold. We were able though to see nearby the little garden designed by Lutyens' friend Gertrud Jekyll, sheltered inside a dry stone wall. Before leaving the island, we walked some way round the coast, listening again to the eider ducks. We past that point where some figures can be seen in Girtin's painting, grouped around a fire. The way he shows the smoke blowing suggests the strength of the wind on the island. I will conclude here with a story in the Life of St Cuthbert that concerns wind and fire. One day, Cuthbert was staying in the home of a holy woman, who rushed in to warn him that a house in the village was alight. Cuthbert told her to keep calm and 'he went out and lay full length in front of the door. Before he had finished praying the wind had changed to the west and put the house the man of God had entered completely out of danger.' Bede concludes that God will 'give us grace, unworthy though we are, to extinguish the flames of vice in this world, and escape flames of punishment in the next.'
In Book IV, Canto XI of The Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser describes the marriage of Thames and Medway. I won't attempt to describe here how this fits into the plot, but it takes place in Proteus's house and the guests include many gods of seas and rivers. Among these are Nile, Rhine, Ganges, Amazon and 'rich Oranochy, though but knowen late' (Spenser's friend Raleigh had explored the Orinoco a year earlier, hoping to find El Dorado). English rivers are of course invited, but so too are the rivers of Ireland, where Spenser was living at the time. Incidentally, there are occasional brief references to the Irish landscape in other parts of The Faerie Queene, e.g. the River Shannon (Shenan) whose battle with the ocean tide is a simile for the struggle between two knights (and perhaps the unequal struggle between Ireland and England too). I have written here before about Spenser and Ireland and it is not really surprising that this wedding encompasses the Irish rivers, for 'why should they not likewise in loue agree'.
Thames, the bridegroom, arrives with his elderly parents Thame and Isis to the accompaniment of a harp played by Arion. His bride arrives later with handmaids and sea nymphs. I will quote here just one stanza, which comes as Thames processes in, dressed in a light blue robe and wearing a coronet in the shape of London. Various tributaries to the Thames are mentioned, including the one nearest to where I live, the Lee.
And round about him many a pretty Page
Attended duly, ready to obey;
All little Rivers, which owe Vassalage
To him, as to their Lord, and Tribute pay;
The chaulky Kenet, and the Thetis grey,
The morish Cole, and the soft-sliding Brean,
The wanton Lee, that oft doth lose his way,
And the still Darent, in whose Waters clean
Ten thousand Fishes play, and deck his pleasant Stream.
I love that description of the Lee. It would make a good quiz to match the epithet to the river in this Canto - stately Severn, storming Humber, speedy Tamar - or guess it from a brief description 'decked all with Woods / Like a Wood-God, and flowing fast to Rhy' (the River Rother). In real life the Thames and Medway meet and merge at Rochester, where Spenser had worked as secretary to the Bishop in 1589. A year later he mentioned in a letter a poem he was working on, now lost, called Epithalamion Thamesis, which prefigured this section of The Faerie Queene. There was also a model for this Canto in another river-wedding poem, De Connubio Tamae et Isis, fragments of which appear in William Camden's great topographical work Britannia (1586). In Camden, Isis is the male god, who comes from a cave in the Cotswolds to meet his bride, Tame, at Dorchester in Oxfordshire, where they retire to the nuptial chamber. After the celebration they rise as one, Thamisis, and make their way downriver, past Windsor, Runnymede, Hampton Court and Richmond, towards the sea.
Are there earlier examples of river-marriage poems? In a an article on the subject ('Spenser, Camden, and the Poetic Marriages of Rivers', Studies in Philology, 1967), Jack B. Oruch notes that the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano wrote a 'topographical pageant' into his poem Lepidina (1496), in which Sebeto, a river god, marries the patron divinity of Naples. As for later writers, there is Michael Drayton, whose Poly-Olbion I have mentioned here before - his Fifteenth Song (1612) takes up again the theme of the marriage of Thame and Isis. The rivers Walla and Tavy are wed in Britannia's Pastorals (1616) by a friend of Drayton's, William Browne of Tavistock. Browne may also be the author of an anonymous poem in which the Torridge marries the Ock. And there is a 1613 masque by Francis Beaumont in which the Thames marries the Rhine, part of the celebrations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (later called The Winter Queen) and Frederick V.
J. M. W. Turner, Union of the Thames and Isis ('Dorchester Mead, Oxfordshire), 1808
Source: Wiimedia Commons
The poetic tradition seems to have faded out in the early seventeenth century. In 1808 Turner exhibited a painting entitled the Union of the Thames and Isis, but this is not one of his mythological paintings. Instead of Camden's magnificent bridal chamber, prepared for Tame by Grace, Concord, Hymen and the Naiads, we have a view of cows standing in brown water. The Tate's curators describe this quiet landscape: 'The Thame, hardly more than a stream, is in the foreground while the
Thames [Isis] is glimpsed beyond the wooden bridge on the right. Modest and
direct, the picture also evokes the seventeenth-century painter Aelbert
Cuyp in its lighting and pastoral imagery.' Two more centuries on, it is hard to imagine a return to the extravagant topological wedding feasts of Spenser's time, though it would be fun to write one in which the river gods make small talk over glasses of fizz, watch the bride and groom trying not to giggle, sit through an inappropriate best man's speech and end up the dancing drunkenly to Abba on a slippery dance floor.
A few weeks back I got round to watching the excellent Mike Leigh film, Mr. Turner. The clip I have embedded above shows him arriving at the Royal Academy on varnishing day and greeting various recognisable figures. There is a warm greeting for Sir John Soane - "As I live and breath", "My old friend!" - but a frosty one for John Constable. There follows the oft-related incident of the red buoy. This is how it was retold a few years ago in one of several newspaper articles on the artists' 'feud', prompted by an exhibition at the which put their their two paintings side by side again.
Back in 1832, Constable was at last exhibiting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, 'a painting on
which he had been working for almost 15 years, at the Royal Academy. In the final days, he laboriously put his finishing touches to the busy scene in the gallery. But Turner stole the show with a single daub of red paint. Seeing that in comparison his serene seascape, Helvoetsluys, was a
little lacking in colour, he entered the room, painted a small red buoy
in the middle of his canvas - which had only taken him a few months to
compose - and left without saying a word. Constable, mortified by Turner's deft touch, remarked: "He has been here and fired a gun."'
J. M. W. Turner, Helvoetsluys, 1832
Watching these two landscape artists portrayed on screen prompted me to wonder about other possible films. Perhaps a prequel, like The Godfather Part II, concerning Turner's younger days could be made, with another actor brought in to play him - the De Niro to Timothy Spall's Brando. I can imagine Martin Gayford's book Constable in Love, which I recently referred to here, being successfully adapted (but Google for films about this artist and you get Carry on Constable, which suggests a rather more irreverent approach to the subject). There are numerous other possibilities... humour, conflict and good scenery in films about artists
abroad for example - John Robert Cozens on his travels with the eccentric William
Beckford, or Thomas Jones and Francis Towne encountering bandits in the hills of Italy. A drama based on the relationship between William Blake and his acolytes The Ancients would be fascinating. With a big SFX budget, John Martin's cinematic paintings could somehow be translated into film, and his life story was not without incident (his brother set fire to York Minster).
When I first started coming regularly to Sheffield in the late nineties it was to work in a building described in Owen Hatherley's The New Ruins of Great Britain (2010) as a 'thrillingly paranoid Cold War megastructure.' In those days I still carried around strong memories of the traumatic TV drama Threads (1984) in which Sheffield is devastated and plunged into a nuclear winter, a conclusion to the Cold War that seemed a very real possibility then. The local Town Hall officials in Threads, people like my work colleagues, end up buried alive. Such extreme fears for the future have come to seem unreal, an old bad dream that is becoming hard to recollect. Our office moved some time ago to a fresh site at St Paul's Place, built over what had been the New Town Hall extension. This structure -'the Egg Box', as it was not very affectionately know - had been erected in 1977 with concrete designed to last five hundred years, but only lasted until 2002. I didn't witness its demolition... but then I had already seen it in ruins, blown apart by the bomb blast in Threads.
Jonathan Wilkinson's print The Egg Box records the design of this lost building, simplified and extracted from its surroundings and the people who used to work there. It can be seen on display in the Millenium Gallery, another new building by the Town Hall in the 'Heart of the City' redevelopment. The current exhibition, Picturing Sheffield, includes many such reminders of the city's vanishing architecture. Next to a painting and photograph of the Kelvin Flats - streets in the sky built in 1967 - there is a case containing artifacts retrieved before the building was pulled down, displayed like archaeological finds: keys, newspaper clippings, an old sign. Castle Market, subject of another Wilkinson print, as well as a painting called Elvis at Castle Fish Market, was still open but under threat when The New Ruins of Britain came out. 'The recession has given it a stay of execution likely to last a couple of years. Get there while you can: nothing like it will be built again.' It was demolished in 2013.
Sheffield always seems to be in a state of flux. William Boden's watercolour snapshots painted in 1903 record views that
no longer exist: Gilbert Street - 'these houses and this passage way
have been demolished'; steps leading to Arundel Lane - 'this area has
since been redeveloped and looks markedly different'; the Sheffield
Canal Basin - now 'converted into luxury flats looking out over the
water.' Even as he worked Boden knew the city was ever-changing; painting
the Pheasant Inn Yard he noted that it was about to be demolished. The Sheffield Blitz, just two nights of bombing in December 1940, left 78,000 houses damaged. Henry Rushbury's Angel Street from Snig Hill, Sheffield shows its aftermath, a scene of smouldering rubble hosed down by a group of soldiers. Derrick Greaves' painting of the city is a composite portrait in industrial greys and austerity
browns, executed at a time when the war damaged areas were being cleared for the new housing and offices that have now been removed and replaced again.
This sense of constantly forging a new urban environment resonates with the image of a steel industry which began here in the eighteenth century, at around the same time as the first images of the city. However, alongside work with titles like Men Seated Around a Fire in a Grinding Shop and Rebuilding a Blast Furnace
the exhibition includes several paintings where traces of
industry are hard to discern. In early views Sheffield is still relatively
small - in Turner's watercolour it could almost be a rural village,
dominated by its church. In the nineteenth century it could
still be painted as a rural idyll with green pastures flanking the river Don and cattle drinking from a pool at Hillsborough. But as the city grew it seems to have been harder to find vistas and scenes that would appeal to prevailing tastes. Bill Brandt's photograph Misty Evening in Sheffield is no more than an abstract detail, and its 'mist' is probably industrial fog.
J.M.W. Turner, View of Sheffield from Derbyshire Lane, 1797
Is Sheffield Ugly? asked Harold Coop in his 1926 painting. Owen Hatherley argues that post-war architecture here made great
use 'of the thing that makes Sheffield truly special - its landscape.
Practically any view here provides you with a photogenic picture of
either a cityscape or the Peak District.' Looking around this exhibition on my most recent trip to Sheffield I got a real sense of this - it would be hard for this city, framed by its green hills, to be 'ugly', even though Hatherley finds little to admire in its newer buildings. Back across the square from the Gallery, I looked out from our office over the city at the patterns of buildings stretching away beyond the Town Hall. On the distant high ground beyond, patches of snow shone in the afternoon sun.
In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen argued that different views of what is beautiful reflect a 'code of reputability' that varies between classes, and the leisure class will not value things on the basis of mere utility. When it comes to landscape, the close-cropped lawn appeals on an atavistic level, 'beautiful in the eyes of
a people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in contemplating a
well-preserved pasture or grazing land.' But it would lose its beauty for the leisure class if it were genuinely productive, or gave that impression. In particular,
'the vulgar suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion, the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the pasture is too strong to be suppressed, the cow's place is often given to some more or less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or some such exotic beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of Western man than the cow, are in such cases preferred because of their superior expensiveness or futility, and their consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in suggestion.
Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves no mean addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting, as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste, that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture, but the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive, therefore it is indecorous.'
William Merrit Chase, View from Central Park, 1889
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