The empty landscapes of the Landes

Théodore Rousseau, Swamp in the Landes, after 1844

I have been so impressed by Kelly Presutti's Land into Landscape that I can't resist one more post on it, highlighting her chapter on 'Wetlands'. Here is a painting she writes about by Théodore Rousseau, the Barbizon painter whose 'ecological' approach to painting entangled trees, untouched by the state's foresters, features in her chapter on 'Forests'.  The Landes, remote from Paris and considered a backward, featureless waste had never attracted landscape painters until Rousseau and Jules Dupré made a trip to the region in 1844. Rousseau's landscape is very different from his dense depictions of Fontainebleau Forest. 

Silvery-white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image without gathering in any defined area. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally across the canvas in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal region. Two-thirds of the canvas is devoted to the sky, but it is a sky that is in intense dialogue with the ground below, picking up on those waterways and creating parallel streams of light and dark above. There are no foreground framing elements; on the contrary, the foreground passes hazily into the middle ground and distance without clear delineation. The scene has regional details, including the scrawny Atlantic pine, a loosely penned-in area with what are likely cattle, and in the far distance what could be sails, as though our gaze might extend to the ocean. It is difficult to measure or grasp the distance covered. The details serve not to establish scale but instead to open up the image outward. Rousseau created an expansive vision, a positive counterpart to the uneasy vastness experienced by earlier travel writers.

Kelly Presutti goes on to discuss late nineteenth century efforts to drain the Landes and cover it with pine trees, a subject covered in Graham Robb's fine 2007 book The Discovery of France. He explains that not a single patch of the original Landes now remains: 

The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. 'The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind', he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory. 

Graham Robb reproduces this photograph with the caption: 'A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears' (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

Photographs like this are fascinating but Presutti also reproduces some of Arnaudin's extraordinary landscape views, so minimal they resemble Sugimoto seascapes. He inscribed a horizon line onto his camera lens in order to achieve this consistent framing. Rather than focus on detail like the flowering grasses, or highlight features like buildings or trees, Arnaudin wanted to capture and preserve the landscape's emptiness. In these images and his writing on the Landes he was 'reversing the terms of beauty and ugliness established by earlier commentators' and lauding 'the appeal of the desert, the dream of solitude, and the pleasure of the uninterrupted expanse.'   

A page of Arnaudin photographs from Land into Landscape  by Kelly Presutti

The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice

François-Auguste Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841 

Having written last time about Victor Hugo I will add something here about his lover Léonie d'Aunet, a novelist and playwright who inspired many of the poems in Les Contemplations (1856). She was not merely a writer though, she was an Arctic explorer. Last year I mentioned the trip painter Emma Stibbons made to Svalbard, following in the footsteps of other artists who have taken part in the Cape Farewell voyages, but Léonie d'Aunet was the first woman ever to visit the archipelago. In 1838 she accompanied her future husband, painter François-Auguste Biard, on an expedition led by the scientist Joseph Paul Gaimard. Biard's painting above was acquired by the Louvre in 1841 and is subtitled 'view taken from the Tombs Peninsula, north of Spitsbergen; aurora borealis effect.' There were no casualties on their expedition, but the figures in the foreground prefigure later famous tragedies. 

An article on a UN website talks about Léonie d'Aunet's published recollections in relation to climate change. She described setting foot on ground at Magdalena Bay: 

“I said on the ground, as one usually does, but I should have said on snow, because I couldn’t see the slightest part of earth,” she wrote in her book Voyage d’une femme au Spitzberg (1854). Even in summer, everything was covered in snow and “between each mountain there are glaciers, which are growing in height every year. This is inevitable: the immense amount of snow that piles up during the 10-month winter cannot change in the summer that lasts only for some weeks. Eventually, in time the glaciers will be as high as the surrounding granite peaks.” The French woman’s predictions have, of course not materialised.

Now the landscape of Svalbard (Spitsbergen is its largest island) is at risk from global heating. 'An avalanche in 2015 cost two lives in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement. They were described as Svalbard’s first deaths from climate change.'

I am not sure if Leonet d'Aunet's book is properly available in an English translation, but there are some quotations from it in a 1903 anthology called Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century. 

The ice-fields and the icebergs[Pg 130] inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry. "These Polar ices," she exclaims, "which no dust has ever stained, as spotless now as on the first day of the creation, are tinted with the vividest colours, so that they look like rocks composed of precious stones: the glitter of the diamond, the dazzling hues of the sapphire and the emerald, blend in an unknown and marvellous substance. Yonder floating islands, incessantly undermined by the sea, change their outline every moment; by an abrupt movement the base becomes the summit; a spire transforms itself into a mushroom; a column broadens out into a vast flat table, a tower is changed into a flight of steps; and all so rapidly and unexpectedly that, in spite of oneself, one dreams that some supernatural will presides over those sudden transformations. At the first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence. Around me hustled fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style: campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas, crenelations, volutes, arcades, façades, colossal foundations, sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our cathedrals—all were massed together and confused in a common disaster. An ensemble so strange, so marvellous, the artist's brush is unable to reproduce, and the writer's words fail adequately to describe![Pg 131]

...

"The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice, clangs and clatters noisily; the lofty littoral peaks glide down to the shore, fall away, and plunge into the gulf of waters with an awful crash. The mountains are rent and splintered; the waves dash furiously against the granite capes; the icebergs, as they shiver into pieces, give vent to sharp reports like the rattle of musketry; the wind with a hoarse roar, scatters tornadoes of snow abroad.... It is terrible, it is magnificent; one seems to hear the chorus of the abysses of the old world preluding a new chaos."

According to the UN article, 'Since the 1980s, the amount of summer sea ice has halved, and some scientists fear it will be gone altogether by 2035.'

The Abandoned Park

Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850

Earlier this week, writing about Tirzah Garwood, I referred to landscapes in art that appear uncanny because they contain outsize plants or objects (I might also have mentioned Paul Nash's Event on the Downs - see my earlier post 'Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting'). Here is another example, a giant mushroom that can be seen in the fascinating Royal Academy exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. In the catalogue Rose Thompson says that 'very little is known about his depiction of a poisonous mushroom. In a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape, the drawing reveals a hidden secret: a ghostly human face trapped within the mushroom's stem.' Most of Hugo's paintings involve pen, brown ink and wash - see for example the The Octopus I included here back in 2012 - but many, like Mushroom - incorporate additional media. Here he has added charcoal, crayon and green, red and white gouache.^* 

Hugo made topographical sketches in France, northern Spain, Luxembourg and Germany, but he didn't travel much compared to contemporaries who explored the Mediterranean and near East. Many of the landscapes in this exhibition are imaginary, with mysterious buildings half submerged in mist or doubled as reflections in water. He incorporated random and accidental effects in a manner that can be likened to the blot landscapes advocated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Cozens. He can also be seen as a proto-surrealist, interested in the unconscious and experimenting with ways to abandon control in his drawing processes. A couple of miniature landscape paintings in the exhibition particularly struck me for their Romantic atmosphere. Undergrowth c. 1847 is 7.3 x 4.5cm seems to show some trees or grass - it is hard to tell at this scale. The Abandoned Park is even smaller, just 4.4 by 3.5cm - about the size of a stamp. It looks like a tiny experiment but Hugo had it engraved and it was published in a magazine, L'Artiste in 1855. Hugo also tried out new approaches in his paintings of castles, e.g. making stencils to create either positive or negative silhouettes that he could then paint over. The Guardian website has a splendid gallery of these 'burg' pictures which gives a good indication of his range of approaches. 

Victor Hugo, The Abandoned Park, before 1855

^*Coincidentally, another great writer-artist, August Strindberg, also painted a strange landscape with a single mushroom in the foreground: Solitary Fly Cap (recently sold at Sotheby's). 

This city which is no longer anything but an orchestra

When in the past I have added extra features to Some Landscapes, I have tried to include some new material at the same time.  What follows was going to be appended to my last post, introducing a new Chronology, but I decided it would be better kept separate (its relevance was that it concerns how a view, in this case a cityscape, has changed through history).  The quotation below, from Victor Hugo, is a great piece of Romantic prose but particularly interests me as an evocation of landscape through sound.  I checked back to see if it was referred to in R. Murray Schafer's classic book The Tuning of the World; it isn't - probably because Hugo was writing a work of historical recreation rather than direct observation.  Whether Paris ever sounded anything like Hugo's idea of the city in 1482 would be difficult to say.

The novel this description is taken from, Notre-Dame de Paris (in a nineteenth century translation on Project Gutenberg) is, like many nineteenth century historical novels, about history.  It was written partly to draw attention to the way contemporary Parisians were neglecting their architectural heritage.  Hugo suggests in it that before the invention of the printing press, poetry was manifested in architecture: cities were like great texts.  He stops the action of the story in order to devote the whole of Book Three to a description of medieval Paris from its cathedral.  Centring on the small island of the City and 'trapezium' of the university, the view would have encompassed a vast semicircle of the Town and, beyond this, the immense plain, 'patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages', ending at the hills on the horizon.  'Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.' 

'And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

'Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

'Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.'

Above the sea and sea-washed town

Claude Monet, Étretat, la porte d'Aval: fishing boats leaving the harbour, c1885

This post begins with Claude Monet at Étretat, a subject I've covered here before in 'The Cliffs at Etretat' and 'Agitated Sea at Etretat'.  Guy de Maupassant watched the artist in action there in 1885 and described what he was like to the readers of Paris periodical Gil Blas. 'At Étretat I often followed Monet about.  He was not so much a painter as a hunter.  He stalked on ahead, followed by his children and Madame Hoschedé, who carried his canvases, sometimes as many as five or six, representing the subject at different times of the day and with different effects.  He took them up and put them aside in turn, according to the changes in the sky.  Face to face with his subject, the painter lay in wait for the sun and shadows, capturing in a few brushstrokes the ray that fell or the cloud that passed.  I have seen him seize a glittering shadow of light on the white cliff and fix it in a flood of yellow tone which strangely rendered the surprising and fugitive effect of that elusive and dazzling brilliance.  On another occasion he took a downpour beating down on the sea into his hands, and dashed it on the canvas - and succeeded in really painting the rain as it seemed to the eye' (Bernard Denvir, The Encyclopedia of Impressionism).

 Claude Monet, Sunset at Étretat, 1883

Maupassant lived in Étretat as a child and in 1883 built himself a house there (where, the following year, he finished writing there that most enjoyable novel, Bel Ami).  Just before this return, Maupassant published a sketch in the Gaulois called 'The Englishman of Étretat'.  This described his youthful encounter with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne at the house of 'a young Englishman of unknown origin' who was rumoured in the village to diet 'exclusively upon monkey (whether, sautéed, roasted, boiled or preserved; no matter)'.  Maupassant was invited to lunch by this eccentric individual after taking part in 'a rescue party formed for a friend of his, carried out to sea'.  The friend was Swinburne, and he proceeded to dazzle Maupassant: 'His words issued forth with a shimmering vitality, galvanised by an imagination both clear and quick, but also hypersensitive and fantastical ... The house where these two men resided was a pleasant, if peculiar abode. The walls were replete with astonishing and strange paintings, veritable expressions of insanity. For instance, if my memory serves me correctly, one watercolour depicted a pink seashell carrying afloat a human skull upon an endless sea, beneath a moon of human form. Here and there were scattered skeletal remains. Particularly of note was a flayed hand; its desiccated skin intact, blackened muscles exposed and ancient traces of blood upon the bright white bone...'

Gustave Courbet, Cliffs at Étretat, 1870 

I first came across this story in Charles Sprawson's The Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, a wonderful book published in 1992 which seems to have been rather overshadowed in recent years by Roger Deakin's Waterlog. Iris Murdoch's review of it sounded to me then charmingly eccentric: 'On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I usually manage to slip into the Thames...' Sprawson refers to Iris Murdoch as 'one of the last of the English river swimmers' and twenty years ago it would have been hard to believe that a whole movement would take off and there would be an Outdoor Swimming Society (whose founder was, according to my wife, impressively outdoorsy even when they were studying at Oxford).  Swinburne's passion for wild swimming began long before he went up to Baliol.  Growing up on the Isle of Wight he would float in the sea, 'lapped in the blue waters and the languid summer tides, as though in the Aegean of his Hellenic dream-world'.  Schooldays at Eton fostered a sado-masochistic association between flogging and swimming which surfaces in his later letters: Sprawson quotes one to Lord Houghton (who had already 'corrupted Swinburne by opening up to him his vast pornographic library'), regretting that the Marquis de Sade had not been aware of the punishment to be experienced in the waves of the North Sea.  Swinburne enjoyed some 'delicious bathes in the most dangerous seas in the world' off Guernsey, having travelled there to meet his hero Victor Hugo only to find that he had left three years before.  It was with some exciting passages from Hugo's novel Toilers of the Sea that Swinburne entertained the fishermen rowing him back to safety at Étretat.

Victor Hugo, The Octopus,

a creature that appears in his novel, Toilers of the Sea, 1866

The lunch Swinburne and his strange friend, George Powell, invited Maupassant to on that memorable day is the subject of an article by Julian Barnes in the excellent Public Domain Review. You can read there fuller details of the English couple's S&M activities with monkeys and servants, based on an account Maupassant gave to Edmond de Goncourt.  Swinburne himself, by contrast, 'memorialised his time on the Normandy coast in two ways. For the rest of his life he kept the “outsize garments” (outsize because he was so tiny) in which the rescuing fishermen had dressed him. And in his 1883 collection, A Century of Roundels, he published a poem called “Past Days”:

Above the sea and sea-washed town we dwelt,
We twain together, two brief summers, free
From heed of hours as light as clouds that melt
Above the sea.

The poem is partly a lament – for the dead Powell, and for passing time; also an idyll recreating “the days we had together” among “The Norman downs with bright grey waves for belt” and the “bright small seaward towns”. It is singularly lacking in references to monkey meat or Sadeian practices.'

Gustave Courbet, The Wave, c. 1869

 
In 1869, a year after he helped rescue Swinburne from the waves, and long before he was an established writer ,spending time with Monet and his family, Maupassant encountered another visitor to Étretat, Gustave Courbet, and watched him at work in his studio. "In a big empty room, a huge man, corpulent and grubby, was using a kitchen knife to smear gobs of white paint on a big bare canvas. Every so often, he'd go and put his face to the window and stare at the storm. The sea came so close that it seemed to assail the house, covering it in spray and noise. The salt water beat like hail against the window panes and streamed down the walls. On the chimney a bottle of cider next to a glass half full.  From time to time Courbet went and drank a few drops, then he came back to his work.  Now, that work became The Wave, and it created quite a stir in the world."  William Feaver refers to Maupassant's description in a review entitled 'Sea Power' and notes that 'being a romantic, Courbet took the wave personally. "In her fury," he told Victor Hugo, "she reminds me of a caged monster who can devour me. One feels carried away."'

D'autres auront nos champs

Landscape is a central theme of Graham Robb's fascinating book The Discovery of France (2007). He is continually overturning the reader's expectations, for example in this passage on the impact of modernity on the French landscape.

'Until the late nineteenth century, there are few equivalents in French literature of the sentiment expressed by William Wordsworth: 'wheresoe'er the traveller turns his steps, / He sees the barren wilderness erased, / Or disappearing' (1814). 'Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?' (1844). The best-known French elegy on the theme of changing landscape is Victor Hugo's 'Tristesse d'Olympio' (1837). It refers to the gatekeeper's cottage near Bièvres, eight miles south-west of Pairs, in which Hugo rented a room for his mistress. To an English poet, the changes described by Hugo would have seemed barely worth a mention. The steep and sandy road where the beloved left her footprint has been paved, and the milestone on which she sat and waited for her lover has been scuffed by cart wheels. A wall has been built around a spring. But other parts are returning to the wild: 'Here, the forest is missing, and there, it has grown.' 'Our leafy chambers now are thickets.' There is no sign that Bièvres would one day be the home of an industrial bakery, the Burospace technology park, the 'RAID' division of the riot police and the Victor Hugo car park.

D'autres auront nos champs, nos sentiers, nos retraites ;
Ton bois, ma bien-aimée, est à des inconnus.

(Others shall have our fields, our paths and hiding places. /
Your wood, my beloved, now belongs to strangers.)'