Potted landscapes on the Tōkaidō

Utagawa Hiroshige, Hiratsuka on the Tokaido, 1833–1834

The Public Domain Review is a constant source of fascinating material and I thought I'd share here something I read about there recently, a book called Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu.

Connecting Edo (now known as Tokyo) to Kyoto, the Tōkaidō road was the most important of the “Five Routes” in Edo-period Japan. This coastal road and its fifty-three stations has been the subject of both art and literature, perhaps most famously depicted by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige in his The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created in the 1830s. This book from the mid-19th century, Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu, presents a series of fifty-three prints created by a relatively obscure ukiyo-e artist named Utagawa Yoshishige, each illustration depicting a Tōkaidō station in the form of a potted landscape. The preface tells us that the illustrations are based on actual pieces constructed by the preface writer’s father, Kimura Tōsen. Creating the models in 1847, a year before publication, Tōsen commissioned Utagawa Yoshishige to make illustrations of each model for a book through which he could share them with the world, and (due to his modesty) asked his son to write the preface.

The Public Domain Review article doesn't identify Kimura Tōsen's landscapes, but you can puzzle them out.  The image below is clearly a view of Hiratsuka - I have reproduced Hiroshige's version above. The other two examples below are (I think) Chiryū (No. 39, scene of a horse fair) and Kanbara (No. 15, a snow scene). Here landscape has been refracted first through the prints of Hiroshige, then through the tray landscapes of Tōsen and then once again through the medium of print, a trace of a trace of a trace of the views from the Tōkaidō road.

The article goes on to explain that of the two main types of Japanese potted landscape, these are likely to have been bonkei - sculpted models featuring people or buildings - as opposed to saikei in which real miniature trees and plants would grow.  The art of creating miniature landscapes was widespread and there were versions of it in China (penjing) and Vietnam (hòn non bộ).  The Wikipedia article refers as well to the Western model railway, a form of landscape art I have so far neglected on this blog!  In Japan there is another related art form, bonseki, in which sand and rocks are used to make a landscape on a black lacquer tray.  Below I have included three examples of women making bonseki tray landscapes, concluding with a recent Youtube clip showing the use of special tools and materials.  These bonseki could be seen as a subgenre of sand art, which reminds me of another childhood pursuit that I've never mentioned here, the art of the sand castle.  Perhaps next time we are on a beach I will have a go at some of the Fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō... 

Katsushika Hokusai, Woman making a bonseki mountain, n.d.

Yōshū Chikanobu, A woman making a bonseki tray landscape showing the full moon, 1899  

Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565

According to Robert D. Denham's, Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography (2010), Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been the subject of at least sixty-three poems.  In addition to the well-known ones by W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, there have been others by, for example, Dannie Abse, Gottfried Benn, Allen Curnow, Michael Hamburger and Philip Whalen.  However, it is clear from this bibliography that Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow has also drawn an interesting range of writers: Williams again, John Berryman, Anne Stevenson, Walter De La Mare (and they keep coming: the new edition of Granta has one by Andrew Motion).  Berryman considers the hunters frozen at a moment in history and Stevenson imagines their moment of arrival as they 'pull / off their caked boots, curse the weather / slump down over stoups. . .'  Williams describes Bruegel's artistry, beginning matter-of-factly - 'The over-all picture is winter / icy mountains / in the background...' - and ending by noting the way he chose 'a winter-struck bush for his / foreground to / complete the picture.'  Walter De La Mare begins in ekphrasis, starting like Williams with the distant landscape: 'Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green / Wall in the wild, cold scene below'.  His poem ends on a mysterious note:

But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.

William Carlos Williams' Bruegel poems appeared posthumously in Pictures from Brueghel and other poems (1962).  Denham's bibliography lists other examples of poets who have written extended sequences or whole volumes devoted to painting.  Perhaps the most prominent of these is, R. S. Thomas, whose ‘Impressions’ in Between Here and Now (1981) include landscapes by Monet, Pissaro and Gauguin.  One of them is devoted to Cézanne’s The Bridge at Maincy which was featured in one of my earlier posts here.  There have also been whole books devoted to single artists, such as Turner and Monet.  Robert Fagles, best known for his translations of Homer, published one of these in 1978: I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh.

Denham has compiled a long list of individual poems but my impression on leafing through it is that relatively few of them have been about independent, unpeopled landscape paintings.  It is though unsurprising to find that writers have been more attracted to paintings suggesting drama, complexity or ambiguity - in the last century artists like Edward Hopper and Marc Chagall were common subjects.  Even in paintings where landscape dominates the composition, people exert a fascination (Czeslaw Milosz, reflecting on a painting by Salvator Rosa, writes of 'figures on the other shore tiny, and in their activities mysterious.')  Simple unadorned description of a what a painting shows is rare, although William Carlos Williams, advocate of 'no ideas but in things', does this in 'Classic Scene', recreating in words Charles Sheeler's 1931 view of the new Ford plant near Detroit.

Although Denham explicitly excludes from the book examples of reverse ekphrasis (paintings inspired by poems), the variety of poems listed invite speculation on ways of combining writing, painting and landscape.  It occurs to me that you could use a kind of algebra (which would need to allow for poets painting and painters writing poems): if, say, the combination of a poet, P, writing, w, about landscape, L, gives rise to a landscape poem, P.w(L), and, similarly, a landscape painting arises from an artist creating a landscape, A.c(L), then a poet writing about a landscape painting is P.w(A.c(L)).  Reverse ekphrasis involving a landscape poem would then be A.c(P.w(L)).  Here's an example of something more complicated.  John Hollander (whose visual poetry I have mentioned here before) wrote a poem about another Charles Sheeler painting, The Artist Looks at Nature (1943).  Sheeler's painting is a kind of landscape - there are grassy slopes and the walls of battlements - but it also contains an artist working on a canvas.  And though apparently painting from nature, his canvas depicts the interior of a studio.  Thus Hollander's poem could be represented as P.w(A.c(L+A.c(L'))).

Being thirsty,
I filled a cup with water,
And, behold!—Fuji-yama lay upon the water,
Like a dropped leaf!

This is Amy Lowell's imagist poem inspired by Hokusai's 'Hundred Views of Mt Fuji'.  Denham's book doesn't really get into the subject of Japanese or Chinese poetry about landscape painting, although he does mention Su Shi's ‘Two Poems on Guo Xi’s Autumn Mountains in Level Distance'. In Chinese art where the 'three perfections' (poetry, calligraphy, painting) are combined in one object, we are often not sure what came first: the poem or the painting.  Where artist and writer are one and the same, my algebraic distinctions would be meaningless. I will end here with part of another poem inspired by a Hokusai, 'Lightning Storm on Fuji' by Howard Nemerov.

Katsushika Hokusai, Rainstorm Beneath the Summit, c. 1830

                        ... the serene mountain rises
And falls in a clear cadence.  The snowy peak,
Where the brown foliage falls away, is white
As the sky behind it, so that line alone
Seems to be left, and the hard rock become
Limpid as water, the form engraved on glass.
There at the left, hanging in empty heaven,
A cartouche with written characters proclaims
Even to such as do not know the script
That this is art, not nature. ...

Green and gold and turquoise waves

Camille Pissarro, The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning (1899)

During a pleasant sunny day last Saturday in the Tuileries Garden I popped into the Musée de l'Orangerie to see their excellent exhibition, 'Debussy, Music and the Arts'. The penultimate room is devoted to contemporary landscape paintings on themes that inspired Debussy: night scenes, seascapes and landscapes by Manet, Degas, Monet and others.  Debussy owned a copy of Hokusai's print The Great Wave and used it as a cover image when he published La Mer, three symphonic sketches for orchestra, in 1905.  Debussy's association with poets and playwrights like Mallarmé and Maeterlinck is highlighted throughout the exhibition and one display includes an edition of his own poetic compositions, Proses lyriques.  The consensus seems to be that these were not very good and I think this is fairly evident from 'The Strand', which attempts to describe the sea in words: 'the waves chatter like silly little girls let out of school in their lustrous frilly green silk dresses...' (see the translation on The Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive).  La Mer, by contrast, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is surely one of music's 'most successful evocations of the sea'.

There are various reviews, programme notes and sound recordings of La Mer online: a Radio 3 programme by Stephen Johnson, for example, in which Debussy's Impressionism is compared to Monet's waterlilies (which of course are also on show at the Musée de l'Orangerie). But I want here to quote from a short article by Nicholson Baker in Granta in which he describes visiting the hotel in Eastbourne where Debussy completed the composition.  'There was dried rain-dust on the outside of the glass, but I looked out over the water and saw, near to shore, an unexpected play of green and gold and turquoise waves – not waves, really, because they were so small, but little manifestations of fluid under-energy. The clouds had the look that a glass of rinse water gets when you’re doing a watercolour – slowly diluting black roilings, which move under the white water that you made earlier when you rinsed the white paint from the brush. But the sea didn’t choose to reflect the clouds that day; it had its own private mallard-neck pallet, the fine gradations of which varied with the slopes of the wind-textured swells. Through the dirty window, I thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen.'

Mount Fuji seen from the beach at Tago

In Japanese literature certain place names, utamakura, have specific poetic associations. 'To mention Miyagino was to imply hagi, bush clover. Yoshinoyama implied cherry blossoms. Tatsuta(gawa) implied brightly coloured autumnal leaves. There were obviously such coloured leaves in autumn not only at Tatsuta, [both] in nearby Yoshinoyama and in far away Miyagino. But to speak of coloured leaves at Miyagino or cherry blossoms at Tatsuta violated decorum, or the hon'i of the place' (The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature). I have described here before references to Tatsuta and Yoshinoyama. Miyagino was visited by Basho on the Narrow Road to the Deep North, where he saw fields of bush clover, and there is a typical poem in The Tale of Genji: 'Hearing the wind sigh, burdening with drops of dew all Miyagi Moor, my heart helplessly goes out to the little hagi frond.'

Photographer John Tran has undertaken an Utamakura project to photograph these poetic places as they appear now. His photograph of Yoshino, for example, shows a bus parked by a dirty road. 'Utamakura were celebrated for their beauty, their literary associations, their emotive connotations, or some purely associative quality. Generations of poets visited and wrote about these sites, adding layer upon layer of depth and complexity to their mystique. Some survive as beauty spots in contemporary Japan, others have changed irrevocably in the intervening centuries. The former beauty spot of Tago no Ura, for example, on the Pacific coast south of Mount Fuji, is now notorious for pollution caused by paper mill effluent. Sites that are preserved as a consequence of their association in the public mind with historical culture draw such huge numbers of visitors that the attraction of the place itself is often supplanted by the overwhelming human activity that occurs there. The massive disparity between the high culture of uta and haiku sensibility and the everyday culture of advertising, cigarette butts and commuter trains forms the basis of the Utamakura Sites series.'

Tago no Ura was formerly famous for its white strand, wisteria and view of Mt Fuji. It was visited (at least in the imagination) by poets following in the footsteps of Yamabe no Akahito, the Nara period court poet whose famous poem in th Man'yoshu anthology depicts the mountain, seen from Tago Bay, under a flurry of snow.

Tago Bay near Eijiri on Tokaido, Katsushika Hokusai, c1830
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Tatsuta River in Autumn

In the Shotetsu monogatari, Shotetsu (1381-1459) wrote ‘If someone asks you in which of the provinces Yoshino may be found, you should answer this way: When I write my poems I simply remember that for blossoms one goes to Yoshino, for red leaves to Tatsuta. Whether those places are in Ise or wherever is not my concern.’ (trans. Steven D. Carter in The Road to Kamatsubara). As this quotation shows, knowledge of poetic geography and the associations of Famous Places were essential for Japanese poets, but familiarity with the real locations was quite unnecessary. As Steven D. Carter puts it, ‘the essence (hon’i) of any Famous Place is defined in terms of a history of poetic treatment; such places occupy poetic rather than physical space’.

There is a song Sasa no Tsuyu composed by Kikuoka Kengyo (1791-1847) which includes the words ‘Yoshino blossoms and Tatsuta leaves - without sake they would be ordinary places.’ Despite this, Yoshino and Tatsuta Park still promote themselves as ideal locations for viewing cherry blossoms and red maple leaves.

Hokusai included a print of the Tatsuta River in Autumn from his series One Hundred Poems (1835-6). The print illustrates a poem by Ariwara no Narihira (825-80) which states that even in ancient days, when the gods held sway, no water shone red like Tatsuta. (Ariwara no Narihira was a contemporary of Minamoto no Toru, whom Hokusai had depicted, talking in the landscape garden he had designed to resemble Shiogama Bay, in his series A True Miror of Chinese and Japanese Poems).

One of the stories told about Hokusai is that when ‘told to paint red maple leaves floating on the Tatsuta River, Hokusai supposedly drew a few blue lines on a long sheet of paper and then, dipping the feet of a chicken in red paint, chased it across the scroll, making the bird's red footprints his maple leaves.’ (Sandy Kita and Takako Kobayashi). This story features in a 1983 poem by the Czech writer Jan Skácel.

The Bay of Shiogama

Katsushika Hokusai, The Minister Toru, c. 1833-4

Among the miniature landscapes reproduced in Japanese gardens, one of the more elaborate was created in the late ninth century by Minamoto no Toru (822-95), Minister of the Left and a son of Emperor Saga. His Kyoto garden recreated the Bay of Shiogama and even included a salt kiln because the famous kiln at Shiogama was believed to be the first place salt had been made in Japan. As Ivan Morris describes it in his book The World of the Shining Prince, the Minister ‘ordered gallons of water to be brought daily from the coast and, while it was being boiled, he and his friends would sit and imagine themselves in the far-of northern region – a region which, of course, nothing short of a ukase would have induced them to visit in person.’ Royall Tyler also describes the creation of this garden. Why was Toru admired, to the extent that a No play was written about him by Zeami? Tyler thinks there are two reasons: (1) he transmuted the raw landscape into an aesthetic object, bringing the hinterland into the capital; (2) his gesture was at the same time respectful and transmitted recognition back onto the original landscape.