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.'

Apocalypse

John Martin, The Bard, c1817

As the Tate Britain exhibition John Martin: Apocalypse comes to the end of its run, it would be interesting to know how well it has done.  There was talk beforehand of the way that Martin's critical reputation has risen and that his spectacular paintings should appeal in a world of 'proliferating IMAX cinemas and giant plasmas' (Ian Christie in Tate Etc. magazine) and contemporary photography framed on a Sublime scale - Edward Burtynsky, Florian Maier-Aichen, Andreas Gursky (Jonathan Griffin also in Tate Etc.)  The Tate's familiar Last Judgement Triptych was accompanied by a new 'theatrical display' intended to evoke the way these paintings were seen around the world in the late nineteenth century.  Looking round the exhibition I found it easy to see why John Martin's work has been mocked - "huge, queer and tawdry" was the verdict of William Makepeace Thackeray.

Martin's shortcomings are more evident when you see the paintings up close: The Bard for example often gets reproduced in books about Romanticism but I'd not previously been able to see how unconvincing some of its details are - Edward I's army a line of little tin soldiers trailing all the way back to the castle gate.  Yet there's still something awesome about these blockbuster paintings (at least that's what the adolescent Chris Foss fan I used to be was telling me) and the exhibition was also fascinating for the way it highlighted Martin's less well known activities - as a decorator of plates, an illustrator of prehistoric creatures (Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology) and a painter of modest topographical water colours, like some views of Richmond Park where, like Edmund Spenser in Ireland, he had an oak tree named after him (how many writers and artists are commemorated in this way I wonder?)

Perhaps the most surprising exhibits were two examples of his schemes to improve the city of London.  The first, which might have been drawn by a 1970s land artist or a 1990s psychogeographer, was his plan for a London Connecting Railway - a beautiful curving form superimposed on a map, like the outline of an octopus.   The other was a drawing of a sewer housed in a new Thames embankment, stretching from 'the Ranelagh Outlet to the Engine Station': a proposal considered seriously at the time but easy to view as one more facet of Martin's capacity to dream up imaginary cities. (It made me think of today's urban explorers, uncovering tunnels like these and scaling buildings to view the city below from a John Martin perspective.)  An excellent article in The Guardian by the John Martin expert William Feaver mentions these engineering projects and claims that Martin 'was ecologically prophetic. In his 1833 A Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis he raised an issue such as had been dismissed by the scoffers who ignored divine warnings and were swept away in Noah's flood: "Is it not probable that a too ignorant waste of manure has caused the richest and most fertile countries such as Egypt, Assyria, the Holy Land, the South of Italy etc to become barren as they now are?"'

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

A Prospect of Vapourland

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, c. 1756-7

Source: Wikimedia Commons

You have to love Horace Walpole - aesthete, antiquary, art historian, man of letters, man of enthusiasms, inventor of the Gothic novel and designer of the extraordinary house at Strawberry Hill.  Simon Schama has a good story in Landscape and Memory about the young Walpole seeking out picturesque scenery in the Alps.  Walpole wrote, "I had brought with me a little black spaniel of King Charles’s breed, but the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature! I had let it out of the chaise for the air, and it was waddling along, close to the head of the horses, on top of one of the highest Alps, by the side of a wood of firs. There darted out a young wolf, seized poor Tory by the throat, and before we could possibly prevent it, sprung up the side of the rock and carried him off."  As Schama says, 'Walpole was the son of the formidable Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, and until the lamentable encounter with the wolf had obviously enjoyed having a silk-eared, sycophantic ‘Tory’ in his lap.'

Tory wasn’t the only pet of Walpole’s that met a sticky end. When his cat drowned in a goldfish bowl it prompted Thomas Gray, Walpole’s traveling companion in the Alps, to write his ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’ (1748):

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below…

When Selima reached out for a fish she ‘tumbled headlong in. Eight times emerging from the flood / She mewed to every watry god, Some speedy aid to send.’ But all in vain. And thus Gray warned ‘ye beauties’ (women!) ‘not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes / And heedless hearts is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters gold.’

This Chinese vase can be seen in a wonderful exhibition currently showing at the V&A, along with other items from Walpole's collection: Renaissance maiolica, medieval coins, a French suit of armour, an Italian shield, old master paintings, portait miniatures (he was an expert on these), a sixteenth century book of swan marks, Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Dr Dee's mirror, a lock of Mary Tudor's hair and a carved limewood cravat which Walpole wore, together with the 'gloves of James I', to greet a party of guests to Strawberry Hill in 1769.  Some exhibits reminded me of objects I've considered on this blog before.  For example, there were two views of Strawberry Hill by Paul Sandby, part of a Sheldon tapestry, and a cup and saucer in the style of Wedgwood's Green Frog Service with delicate painted views of Richmond Castle, the Mausoleum at Castle Howard and Stoke Gifford in Gloucestershire.  Walpole, like Bruce Chatwin, loved the stories connected with objects.  It's easy to see how desirable, for example, he would have found Alexander Pope's own copy of The Iliad, the very book used to make Pope's celebrated translation.  This small volume has a sketch on the flyleaf drawn by the poet himself, showing Twickenham seen from Pope's Grotto.

Last week I wrote about landscapes viewed from a specific house, where the real subject of the painting is the house itself.  Walpole commissioned sketches of this kind, including a striking View from the Holbein Chamber by Joseph Charles Barrow, in which two figures are seen approaching through a strange tunnel of trees, like characters in a Gothic novel.  However, the most unusual painting in the exhibition is a dream landscape in which a distant hill takes on the form of a lion and a nearby tree is full of snakes. Painted in 1759 by Walpole's friend Richard Bentley, who helped design the Gothick rooms of Strawberry Hill, its title is A Prospect of Vapourland.

Johann Heinrich Müntz, Strawberry Hill, c. 1755-59

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Desert in bloom

Thomas Gray wrote in his ‘Elegy’

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Gray never saw desert flowers, but others poets have…

Abu Tammam (c805-45) wrote a qasida (ode) on Spring, quoted in Robert Irwin’s anthology ‘Night and Horses and the Desert’, from a translation by Julia Ashtiany. Abu Tammam was an inventive exponent of metaphor which gives his landscape a striking visual quality. He describes the spring flowers, yellow and red, clashing like the partisans of the hostile Mudar and Yemen clans, who carried coloured banners (reminding me of those battle scenes in Kurosawa’s Ran). The yellow flowers are likened to pearls dipped in saffron, the red to a sunrise where the breezes are tinted with safflower. What exactly these clashing armies might be I am not able to say, although on the evidence of this site the yellow might be broomrape, the red, bladder dock.

According to Irwin, Arabic landscape poetry only really began a century after Abu Tamman, with writers like Sanawbari (d. 945) and Kushajim (d. 970-71). These poets aimed to describe the beauty of gardens and nature, whilst earlier poets had tended to write about landscape only in relation to emotions of nostalgia or loss.