The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities for an 'ochre afternoon tea' with Sunflower Chocolate Pot, a 'healing plants of Provence' creative workshop and a 5-minute meditation session based on Van Gogh's Wheatfield, with Cypresses). As Rachel Cooke says in her review, 'on the walls you’ll find only titles and dates (to know more, you must look up each painting in a booklet): a minimalism designed to allow one’s thoughts and feelings to flow freely, unimpeded by talk of bloody ears and gunshot wounds.' 

Jonathan Jones enthused about the show and observed that 

In a conventional telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally split, as his first ecstatic months ended in self-harm and hospitalisation. Here, the translation to Saint-Rémy is not a tragedy at all. You see how his style got ever more free there. A later room is filled with landscapes he painted around Saint-Rémy that teeter on total abstraction: in The Olive Trees, the earth erupts in waves like the sea, trees dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from rules it could be by Picasso.

The 1889 drawing of olive trees above that I photographed in the exhibition shows just how abstract and decorative his work was becoming. 

There is a whole room dedicated to one landscape series: drawings made in the vicinity of the ruined 12th-century Montmajour Abbey. The curators note that its 'terrain put the artist strongly in mind of the abandoned garden 'Le Paradou' (a Provençal word for 'Paradise'), which featured in Emile Zola's novel The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875).' The sketch below is The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888) and it 'includes an obscured glimpse of Arles on the far left. In Zola's novel, the Abbé, who has forgotten his vows of chastity due to amnesia, occupies the wild paradise of Le Paradou with his lover, distanced from the realities of everyday life.' After reading this I thought I would make an effort to read the novel and then do some more in depth comments here, but online reviews of it are not encouraging. A film adaptation by Georges Franju doesn't sound that enticing either. If I ever do get round to either of these I may add a postscript to this blog post. 

Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm

We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photography in museums was prohibited; now I find my phone full of images and snaps of the accompanying wall texts. I thought here I would highlight three nineteenth century Czech artists in the National Museum, none of whom I've mentioned before: Antonín Mánes, Julius Marák and Otakar Lebeda. Here are the images, the curators' brief explanations and a few additional thoughts prompted by them.

Antonín Mánes, Landscape with Temple Ruins, 1827-8

Text: Mánes is considered to be the founder of Czech landscape painting. During 1836-1843, he was the professor of the landscape school at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and prepared his three children, Josef, Quido, and Amalie, for careers in painting. Landscape with Kelso Abbey Ruins was inspired by the popular poem Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard by Thomas Gray, translated into Czech by Josef Jungmann with the title Elegie na hrobkach veskych in 1807. The view of the landscape with the abbey ruins is a symbolical reminder of ephemerality and death - memento mori; therefore, the painter placed his signature 'Antonius Manes Bohemus' on the tombstone.

I was intrigued by the idea of a Czech landscape painting in the classical style (which we associate with Italian scenery) based on a ruin in Scotland but also (according to the above), derived from a poem written about a Buckinghamshire churchyard. Of course Gray's Elegy (1751) was so influential that the general idea of writing about the passing of time in a landscape with ruins quickly caught on and spread to other sites - John Langhorne's Written among the ruins of Pontefract Castle in 1756, to name just one example. The Elegy was also quickly translated into many languages - in a 2013 study Thomas N. Turk found at least 266 versions in forty languages (he mentions the Jungmann Czech translation but has it down as 1886 - maybe he's referring to a later edition). 

There are several notable families of painters in the history of Czech art. Mánes's daughter Amálie Mánesová actually specialised in landscape (see for example Landscape with a Figure, 1843) although appranently this was because her father thought portrait painting inappropriate for women.

 Julius Marák, Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm, 1891-2

Text: In 1887, Julius Marák, who was in Vienna at that time, was called to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to be in charge of the landscape painting studio. In 1891, he received a commission from the Ministry of Culture and Education to paint two large canvases of old-growth forests. Marak created the preparatory sketches in Boubin Virgin Forest, which was designated as a protected area as early as 1858. He first completed Sumava Virgin Forest in the Storm while he worked on the counterpart canvas Sumava Virgin Forest in the Sun (today in possession of Ceská sporitelna bank) until 1897. The delay was caused by Marak's health problems and his full-time position at the Academy, where he educated many young landscape artists such as Antonin Slavicek, Frantisek Kaván, and Otakar Lebeda.

This is a large canvas showing trees engulfed in darkness and swirling strands of mist with what light there is illuminating broken stumps and moss but barely penetrating the depths of the forest. It feels like a primal scene with no hint of human activity. It woud be interesting to see the companion piece owned by the Česká spořitelna (Czech Savings Bank) - I can't see this online. What's particularly interesting here is the idea of art being commissioned as part of the effort to preserve old-growth forests. This sounds quite progressive. Sumava is now a National Park, on the southern border with Bavaria. It stretches northwest of Horní Planá, the town where Adalbert Stifter was born, and it was in this region that he set many of his stories. The park website explains that when the prtected area began in 1858 it  extended to 143.7 hectares, but 'the wind and subsequent bark beetle calamities, especially in the areas affected by wood extraction on Pažení mountain and in vicinity of Boubín peak' reduced this to less than fifty.  

Julius Marák also had a daughter who became a painter. One of the highlights of the fourth floor of the huge Trade Fair Palace in Prague is an 1896 self-portrait by Josefina Mařáková with her father. Sadly her health wasn't good and she died in 1907.

 

Otakar Lebeda, Mountain Lake in the Krkonoše Mountains, 1896

Text: Otakar Lebeda painted this canvas during his last holiday stay in September 1896. Lebeda painted the two glacial lakes, Small and Big, today in Poland, several times, always choosing an unusual view from above to the depth. The realistic depictions of steep stone hillsides sloping down to the water may also be interpreted as a view into a soul, or as a symbol of death. In June 1897, Lebeda graduated from the landscape painting studio of Julius Marák at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he was one of the most talented students. Four years later, he prematurely ended his life and promising career by shooting himself with a revolver as a result of depression and physical exhaustion. 

Otakar Lebeda was only twenty-three when he died and during his final months he was working on a large painting Killed by Lightening, 'inspired by a true event that took place in the Chodsko region' (NGP). What to make of the idea that a landscape like this mountain lake reflects a depressed mental state? Is there anything documented that supports this or is it over-interpretation? It certainly is a gloomy scene. 

I wrote here in 2016 about the affect of mental health on the landscapes of Lars Hertervig, where the painting style does seem clearly disturbed. (Last year's Nobel Prize winner for literature Jon Fosse has written two novels about Hertevig, Melancholy I and II, but I haven't felt like wanting to read them). There are other examples where we are tempted to look for signs of depression in landscape painting, most obviously Vincent Van Gogh, whose last painting was Wheat Field with Crows (1890)... Except it actually wasn't, as the Van Gogh Museum explains. 'It is often claimed that this was his very last work. The menacing sky, the crows and the dead-end path are said to refer to the end of his life approaching. But that is just a persistent myth. In fact, he made several other works after this one.'

A Lane Near Arles

One of the many pleasures of Vincent van Gogh's paintings is the way he changes his style of painting at different places in the composition whilst retaining their overall harmony.  Here we have densely stippled foliage, a path defined by broad strokes of yellow and lavender, and a sky in which the zig-zag swirls of blue suggest the movements of a Provençal breeze. As you can see below, there are also blocks of pure colour - the green of the fields, the yellow of the house, the blue (!) of the tree trunks.  But it all works perfectly together. The same can be said of other landscapes from this time, like Farmhouse in Provence with its wonderful lilac wall and turquoise sky.  You imagine van Gogh looking at these landscapes and intuiting the phenomena before him - tree, path, sky - in such a way that the right means of conveying them in paint came almost instinctively.

Vincent van Gogh, A Lane Near Arles, 1888

A fine rain was falling

'Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.' -  Henri-Frédéric Amiel

This is one of those quotes about landscape you come across in a diverse range of books.  It is also available in tweet-friendly images, such as the one below where it is superimposed on a mountain scene.  This longer version is from the translation of Amiel's Journal Intime, published in 1885 by the British novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward.  The whole book can be found on Project Gutenburg, so I have copied from there below the journal entry where Amiel makes his observation.  As can be seen, it was prompted by an autumn day, with leaves on the ground and a few flowers lingering in the garden.  The mountains in the distance were the Alps - Lancy is part of Geneva, the city where Amiel was born and died.  This entry was written when he was thirty-one.  He was a poet and a philosopher but this journal only appeared posthumously. 'It reveals,' according to the Encyclopedia Bitannica, 'a sensitive man of great intellectual ability, struggling for values against the skepticism of the age. Widely translated, it gained Amiel lasting fame.'

 

October 31, 1852. (Lancy.)—Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the Shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and reddish; the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and decked in ragged splendors of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch a phenomenon to make it render up to me its moral significance. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able at most to attain as a final result. The soul of nature is divined by the poet; the man of science, only serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration.

Ferdinand Hodler, Lake Geneva with the Savoy Alps, 1907

Mrs Ward's translation of Amiel's Journal was reviewed and praised by the great Victorian critic, Walter Pater.  He quotes Amiel's statement about landscape and the soul in this review (which can be read online).  He also observes that although 'in Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery', there are passages of natural description in Amiel that 'rise to real distinction.'   He gives three examples, on the effects of fog, frost and rain, and I will close here by quoting the last of these:

August 22, 1873. (Scheveningen).—The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere gray; it is a time favorable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as these; they revive one’s converse with one’s self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its very center. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so because at such times the soul, instead of being polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought, feels her own totality and is conscious of herself. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Scheveningen Beach in Stormy Weather, 1882

Reed writing

Sesonji Koreyuki, Wakan rōeishū Anthology, 1160

Ashide, reed writing, developed in the Heian dynasty as a form of calligraphy written in such a way as to imitate natural forms: reeds, rivers, trees.  By the twelfth century they were being written over actual landscape paintings, creating a hybrid form.  There is an example dating from 1160 in the Kyoto National Museum by Sesonji Koreyuki (or Fujiwara no Koreyuki), Poems from Wakan Roeishu.  'As the line of characters crosses the drawn-out contours of the image, it transforms into sprouting grasses and cranes standing along what might be a riverine strand' (Thomas LaMarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaelogy of Sensation and Inscription). Landscape is depicted in the overall image and text, but also registered at different levels of magnitude in the shapes and sounds of the individual words.  This artwork opens up the possibility that calligraphy can itself evoke elements of the setting and atmosphere, like a film soundtrack, whilst words and pictures tell the story.

If calligraphy were to take on too many of the attributes of landscape painting it would lose its status as an artform.  The point is made by Stephen Addiss in relation to the first piece in his book 77 Dances: Japanese Calligraphy by Poets, Monks and Scholars, 1568-1868.  This poem, a detail of which is shown here, was written by Emperor Goyozei (1571-1617).  The most heavily inked characters mean big well river and the next most visually stressed character means snow. ‘Even a quick viewing therefore reveals the main theme of the poem: the Ōi River in snow.’ And although this is not an example of reed writing, since its symbols do not have a dual role as words and image, the paper itself provides a subtle link to its subject matter:

‘The primary pattern on the paper is that of waves, sometimes almost still and sometimes curving, with a secondary element of reeds appearing several times. Near the top, however, a heavier undulating line in blue suggests possible islands in the river or perhaps even the nest of reeds covered with snow. If the latter, it is done in a semi abstract manner, since too much visual correspondence with the poem might be considered vulgar by refined court aesthetes.’

 Vincent Van Gogh, Marsh with Water Lilies, 1881

From a Western perspective the idea of 'reed writing' evokes the idea of the reed pen, used in landscape art by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In 1888 Van Gogh wrote to tell his brother "These drawings are done with a reed cut the same way as you’d cut a goose quill. I plan to do a series like that. And I hope to do better than the first two. It’s a process I already tried in Holland in the past, but I didn’t have as good reeds there as here."  I have mentioned his use of a reed pen before in relation to an 1881 drawing of the marsh at Passievaart.  And I'll end here by quoting Robert Hughes on the way Van Gogh used his reeds to draw stems of grass in a style that approached calligraphy.

'The reed was not flexible, like other pens. Nor did it hold a lot of ink, so it would not produce long, sinuous lines. The style it favoured was short, blunt, angular and (in a limited way) calligraphic. In some drawings you can see Van Gogh brilliantly exploiting the limitations of the reed. He draws a tuft of grass, for instance, as five or six springing, more or less parallel strokes. The first one is heavy with ink. The next, less so. By the fourth or fifth, the reed is almost empty and the ink strokes faint. This creates the impression of a round tussock, rendered not as flat pattern, but turned towards the light. Then he dips his reed in the ink bottle, recharges it and begins again, on a different clump of grass.'

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. ...

Helvoetsluys

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).

There was an article in Sight and Sound last year by Michael Brooke about artists on film, but very few of them could be considered landscape artists.  Perhaps their lives have been relatively undramatic.  Van Gogh is an exception, of all artists probably the most frequently portrayed.  I recall enjoying two films which came out in fairly quick succession: Vincent and Theo (1990) with Tim Roth (long before his recent turn as Sepp Blatter in that FIFA-funded movie about FIFA), and Vincent (1987) which was particularly effective because it used the artist's wonderful letters, voiced by John Hurt.  Of course Paul Gauguin, another revolutionary painter of landscape, will normally have a prominent role in films about Van Gogh - Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for portraying him in Lust for Life (1956) - but there don't seem to have been major films featuring contemporaries like Monet or Cézanne.  Notwithstanding the success of Mr. Turner, more artist biopics would I think be less welcome than more oblique takes on their art - Michael Brooke mentions unusual treatments of Munch, Hockney and Picasso.  He also refers to The Quince Tree Sun (1992), a film perhaps reminiscent of Monet's experiments or the doubts of Cézanne, as it concentrates on a painter 'as he tries – and frequently fails – to capture the effect of light reacting to the leaves and fruit of the quince tree in his garden'. 

 

Passievaart, a huge marsh

I finally made it to the Royal Academy's Van Gogh exhibition last weekend - I think it is the first exhibition devoted just to Van Gogh that I've ever been to.  I hadn't anticipated quite how overwhelmingly impressive some of it would be, given the familiarity of the work - it's well worth queuing and braving the crowds to see, if you haven't done so already.  There are about 35 letters, 65 paintings and 30 drawings and I was hooked from the first sketch, which dates from June 1881.  Looking up the relevant letter to Theo on the amazing Van Gogh Museum website, I see he wrote: "I must tell you that Rappard [an artist] was here for 12 days or so, and has now left.  Naturally he sends you his regards.  We went on a fair number of excursions together, several times to the heath at Seppe, among other places, and the so-called Passievaart, a huge marsh."  Although the emphasis in this first room of the exhibition is on Van Gogh's efforts to teach himself drawing, A Marsh seemed to me an impressive enough achievement in itself, combining experiments in mark making with a composition that conveys the misty poetry of the landscape.

Vincent van Gogh, A Marsh, 1881

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

In his review of the exhibition Adrian Searle traces a connection with landscape in the materials van Gogh used. 'Often the artist drew with a pen that he cut himself from the reeds that grew at the margins of Dutch waterways and roadside ditches in Province. He noted that the reeds in the south were better for drawing. For finer work, he also picked up feathers for the quills he cut to make nibs.  It's more than coincidental that reeds and birds also appear in Van Gogh's drawings. I wonder if he ever used river water to dilute his inks, and for the somewhat less successful watercolours that he made. Even the charcoal he used in his early drawings have a connection to the earth itself. Those pollarded willows that appear in his work time and again also provide the charcoal that he used.  Such connectedness would have suited his pantheist view of the world.'

The Starry Night

Much has been written this autumn about Van Gogh's letters, following publication of the vast new six-volume collected edition.  Among those queuing up to praise them have been Andrew Motion, Julian Bell and Richard Shone.  And rightly so I'm sure - for what it's worth, the considerably cheaper Penguin edition in our house remains the most moving, stimulating and beautiful set of letters I have ever read.

I have talked about the letters here before and quoted from one that described the landscape at Zweeloo.  You can see this letter on the new Van Gogh Letters site, with links to a facsimile and comprehensive notes. In the letter Van Gogh writes "I passed a little old church, just exactly, just exactly the church at Gréville in Millet’s little painting in the Luxembourg" and you can click on the link to see this painting. It's an amazing site and it would be great to see someone do the same kind of thing here for Turner or Palmer, or writers like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Some of the sketches Van Gogh included in his letters were landscapes - see for example his letter to Emile Bernard of 19 June 1888 ("Herewith another landscape... I painted it at the height of the mistral.")  Earlier in this letter he says "To be honest with you, I have absolutely no objection to the countryside, since I grew up in it - I am still enchanted by snatches of the past, have a hankering after the eternal, of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols.  But when shall I ever get round to doing the starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind?" 

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, September 1888

However, with so many reviewers earnestly urging people to read the letters I'm tempted to recall an alternative take on them - 'If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists' by Woody Allen.  In these letters Vincent writes to Theo, for example, that 'my old friend Monet refuses to work on anything but very, very large mouths and Seurat, who is quite moody, has developed a method of cleaning one tooth at a time until he builds up what he calls a “full, fresh mouth.” It has an architectural solidity to it, but is it dental work?'

Olive trees

D. H. Lawrence was not 'profoundly interested in landscape'. In a 1929 essay 'Introduction to these pictures', he praises artists like Titian, Velazquez and Rembrandt, who depict real people, and criticises lesser painters like Reynolds and Gainsborough, for whom the clothes were more important than the body. He then goes on to say that 'landscape seems to be meant as a background to an intenser vision of life, so to my feeling painted landscape is background with the real subject left out... It doesn't call up the more powerful responses of the human imagination, the sensual, passional responses... It is not confronted with any living procreative body.'

The fact that landscape painting avoids dealing with the body is the reason, according to Lawrence, why the English have excelled at it. 'It is a form of escape for them, from the actual human body they so hate and fear, and it is an outlet for their perishing aesthetic desires... It is always the same. The northern races are so innerly afraid of their own bodily existence... that all they cry for is an escape. And, especially, art must provide that escape.' This would be one way of interpreting the northern 'Romantic tradition' of landscape painting (which I've discussed here before). And whilst these comments seem almost stereotypically Lawrentian, they point to a real concern that landscape art can represent a refusal to engage with humanity - an accusation that could still be levelled at land artists like Richard Long, walking in the wilderness.

Lawrence goes on to describe the impressionists' escape into light and then the post-impressionists who 'still hate the body - hate it. But, in a rage, they admit its existence, and paint it as huge lumps, tubes, cubes, planes, volumes, spheres, cones, cylinders, all the "pure" or mathematical forms of substance. As for landscape, it comes in for some of the same rage. It has also suddenly gone lumpy. Instead of being nice and ethereal and non-sensual, it was discovered by van Gogh to be heavily overwhelmingly sensual.'

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The season of rainy winter

Hesiod's Works and Days is one of the earliest Greek poems we have, which makes it a bit of a shame that the author can come over on first reading as a bit of a bore. As Dorothea Schmidt Wender puts it in the Penguin translation - 'many of us find his conservatism, pessimism, didacticism, misogyny and lack of fun quite uncongenial.' However, she also points out moments of genuine artistry in the poem, as in the contrast he draws between the lives of those who have to work in the harsh North Wind and 'the soft-skinned girl who stays / Indoors at home', able to go 'to an inner room at home' and 'take a nap upon a winter day.' The description of this wind, like other parts of the poem, give a sense of the landscape of Boeotia: 'He blows through Thrace, where horses graze; he blows / On the broad sea and whips it up: the earth / and forest mutter; in the mountain pass / He falls on high-leafed oaks and thick-branched pines / And brings them to the fruitful earth; while all the boundless forests cry...'

Opening page of a 1539 version of Hesiod's Works and Days

Here is another short extract concerned with ploughing from one of the translations available online: 'Mark, when you hear the voice of the crane who cries year by year from the clouds above, for she gives the signal for ploughing and shows the season of rainy winter; but she vexes the heart of the man who has no oxen. Then is the time to feed up your horned oxen in the byre; for it is easy to say: “Give me a yoke of oxen and a wagon,” and it is easy to refuse: “I have work for my oxen.” The man who is rich in fancy thinks his wagon as good as built already--the fool! he does not know that there are a hundred timbers to a wagon. Take care to lay these up beforehand at home. So soon as the time for ploughing is proclaimed to men, then make haste, you and your slaves alike, in wet and in dry, to plough in the season for ploughing, and bestir yourself early in the morning so that your fields may be full.'

A small bronze sculpture of a plough is one of several works by Georges Braque inspired by Hesiod that was showing at the Royal Academy's exhibition Behind the Mirror: Aimé Maeght and His Artists. The show included Braque's late landscapes which I had seen before but not previously thought of in connection with Works and Days. At the RA they were juxtaposed with Braque's works based on Hesiod and they seem to convey a sense of archaic poetry and reduce the landscape down to its fundamental elements of earth and sky. A couple of them include a plough in the foreground.

The last time I saw paintings like Landscape - Fields with Overcast Sky (1956-7) and Plain I (1955-56) was at the late RA's late Braque show in 1997. A review article by Robert Rosenblum made the comparison with Van Gogh, who 'looms large in a startlingly direct series of Normandy landscapes begun in 1955, a response, perhaps, to the exhibition "Van Gogh et les peintres d'Auvers-sur-Oise," held at the Orangerie in the winter of 1954-55. One of these poignantly simple paintings, Landscape with Dark Sky, is virtually a re-creation of the Dutch master's Wheatfield with Crows, not only in theme and format but in its heavy impasto, a bit of pictorial therapy whose outdoor air and expansive horizon offer a temporary respite from the sequestered visual and emotional intricacies of the studio paintings.'

Back in 1982 John Russell described one of these late landscapes as having 'precisely the pondered look, the rich encrusted texture, and the mingling of real and unreal, poetical and matter-of-fact, that we treasure in late Braque.' These are the qualities we can still read in Hesiod's Works and Days.

The village of Zweeloo

There is an excellent Webexhibits site containing English translations of the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. The site allows you to search for words; I tried putting in Daubigny, the Barbizon landscape painter whom Van Gogh often mentions, and the site yields 58 results and a timeline showing each of these letters. The first is from 23 July 1873, when Van Gogh was in London and writing to his brother about English art: “Among the old painters, Constable was a landscape painter who lived about thirty years ago; he is splendid - his work reminds me of Diaz and Daubigny.” The last letter to talk about Daubigny is Van Gogh’s final letter, written from Auvers-Sur-Oise a few days before his death, exactly seventeen years after the letter from London: “Perhaps you will take a look at this sketch of Daubigny's garden - it is one of my most carefully thought-out canvases. I am adding a sketch of some old thatched roofs and the sketches of two size 30 canvases representing vast fields of wheat after the rain.”

 

Van Gogh wrote some beautiful descriptions of landscape. A favourite of mine is the letter of 2 November 1883 from Drenthe, describing a visit to Zweeloo which started before dawn. As the first light appeared “everything, the few cottages we passed - surrounded by wispy poplars whose yellow leaves one could hear falling - a stumpy old tower in a little churchyard with an earth bank and a beech hedge, the flat scenery of heath or cornfields, everything was exactly like the most beautiful Corots. A stillness, a mystery, a peace as only he has painted it...”

“The ride into the village was so beautiful. Enormous mossy roofs of houses, stables, covered sheepfolds, barns. The very broad-fronted houses here are set among oak trees of a superb bronze. Tones in the moss of gold-green, in the ground of reddish or bluish or yellowish dark lilac-greys, tones of inexpressible purity in the green of the little cornfields, tones of black in the wet tree trunks, standing out against the golden rain of swirling, teeming autumn leaves, which hang in loose clumps - as if they had been blown there, loose and with the light filtering through them - from the poplars, the birches, the limes and the apple trees. The sky smooth and bright, shining, not white but a barely detectable lilac, white vibrant with red, blue and yellow, reflecting everything and felt everywhere above one, hazy and merging with the thin mist below, fusing everything in a gamut of delicate greys.”

As the description continues, Van Gogh’s enthusiasm for this humble landscape becomes genuinely moving. “Journeying through these parts for hour after hour, one feels that there really is nothing but that infinite earth, that mould of corn or heather, that infinite sky. Horses and men seem as small as fleas. One is unaware of anything else, however large it may be in itself; one knows only that there is earth and sky.”

Quotations are from Webexhibits, which gives permission to use the letters under Creative Commons.