Wandering on the Tiantai Mountains

Unknown artist, Jade Mountain Illustrating 

the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion, 1790
Source: Wikimedia Commons

This landscape in jade shows Mount Kuaiji (in present-day Zhejiang) and the celebrated Orchard Pavilion Gathering that took place there during the Spring Purification Festival on the third day of the third month in the year 353.  The event is most famous for a piece of calligraphy, the Lantingji Xu - 'Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion' written by Wang Xizhi (303-361).  He describes the location, with its

'mighty mountains and towering ridges covered with lush forests and tall bamboo, where a clear stream with swirling eddies cast back a sparkling light upon both shores.  From this we cut a winding channel in which to float our wine cups, and around this everyone took their appointed seats.  True, we did not have harps and flutes of a great feast, but a cup of wine and a song served well enough to free our most hidden feelings.' (trans. Stephen Owen)

Feng Chengsu, Tang Dynasty copy of Wang Xizhi's Lantingji Xu (now lost) 
Source: Wikimedia Commons

There were forty-two literati at this famous party and one of them was the poet Sun Chuo (Sun Ch'o, 314-71), whose fu 'Wandering on the Tiantai Mountains' has also been translated by Stephen Owen.  Here is an extract:

... I pushed through thickets,     dense and concealing,
I scaled sheer escarpments     looming above me.
I waded the You Creek,      went straight on ahead,
left five borders behind me     and fared swiftly forward.
I strode over arch     of a Sky-Hung Walkway,
looked down ten thousand yards     lost in its blackness;
I trod upon mosses     of slippery rock,
clung to the Azure Screen     that stands like a wall ...

Burton Watson has also translated this poem and writes of Sun's journey that 'as he proceeds up the mountain, the scenery becomes increasingly fantastic and idealized, until at the end he reaches a plane of pure philosophy, in which Taoist and Buddhist allusions are balanced one against the other.'

Dai Xi,  Rain-coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai, 1848

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Sky-Hung Walkway referred to in this poem was a natural stone bridge.  It has often been depicted in art - The Smithsonian has a twelfth century painting of it by Zhou Jichang and they describe it as follows:

'The natural rock bridge spanning a waterfall is one Tiantai's most famous sights. According to legend, this arch is also a pathway to paradise where the five-hundred luohan, saintly guardians of the Buddhist faith, worship and dwell among magnificent celestial temples. Those who venture to tread this perilous trail, however, find that the bridge, which narrows to a width of several centimeters, is obstructed at its far end by an insurmountable block of stone.'

There are some photographs online of tourists admiring what I assume is this same rock bridge (e.g. on Wikimedia).  In the Japanese ink painting below by Soga Shōhaku (1730–1781) it looks much more spectacular.  In this dramatic scene a mother lion throws cubs over the cliff to see which will succeed in life by being able to climb back up to her.

Soga Shōhaku, Lions at the Stone Bridge of Mount Tiantai, 1790 

Source: Met Museum

An article by Zornica Kirkova explains that Mount Tiantai also features in a poem by Sun Chuo’s friend, the Buddhist monk Zhidun (314–366).  This 'opens in the idyllic setting of a spring garden, where the poet leisurely reflects on the passage of time and, “moved by things” ... lets his thoughts soar up to the sacred realm of the Celestial Terrace Mountain'.

The piping creek plays clear tunes.
Empyrean cliffs nurture numinous mists,
Divine plants, holding moisture, grow.
Cinnabar sand shimmers in the turquoise stream,
Fragrant mushrooms sparkle with the five brilliances.

In this poem, 'the mountains are envisioned as a sublime and sacred realm of purity and beauty.'  As with Sun Chuo, more realistic images - the cool breeze, the clear tunes of the creek - are combined with 'fantastic paradise depictions, pertaining to the theme of immortality (eternal divine plants, cinnabar sand, magic mushrooms)'.  It is easy to forget when you read poetry like this that it is a real mountain, so I will end here with an image from the internet taken with an iPhone 6S in June 2016, 1,663 years after the Orchard Pavilion Gathering.

The cliffs of Mount Tiantai

Source: Huangdan2060

On the Banks of the Yangtze

Isabelle Bird, Trackers Houses on the Banks of the Yangtze, 1896

Source: The Ammonite Press.

In sketching, a landscape is represented by signs on paper, but in photography the actual view is imprinted as an image by the light that shone at that moment in time.  What, though if this 'indexical' process of signification went beyond just the action of light?  An article I was reading in the New York Review of Books this week suggests further possibilities.  Here Colin Thubron is discussing the journey into China of the nineteenth century photographer, Isabella Bird.

'After sunset she would set about developing the glass-plate negatives and toning her prints. Her darkroom was the Chinese night, but she had to block up chinks in the cabin walls to keep out the light of opium lamps. Then she cleaned the chemical from her negatives in the river and hung the printing-frames over the side of the boat. A faint trace of Yangtze mud survives on a few of her prints.'

So, in addition to light, her landscapes were imprinted with Chinese soil, dissolved in its great river.  All four elements could be said to have gone into the formation of these photographs.  The river's form was traced by light, purified by water and earth, and then fixed into permanence by the air that passing over its surface.

Isabella Bird, Hsin Tan Rapid on the Yangtze River, 1896

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Yangtze River that the sixty-four year old Isabella Bird travelled had no modern dams or steam boats.  Thubron admires her courage in ascending its gorges in a shallow-bottomed houseboat, rowed by sixteen men who would 'heave against the current and curl into wadded quilts at night, lost in opium sleep'.  It was a perilous and uncomfortable journey. 'Where perpendicular cliffs constricted the Yangtze into a fearsome torrent, big junks and sampans were hauled upriver by teams of trackers sometimes four hundred strong, threading precipitous paths and rock-cut steps with the din of drums and gongs and the explosion of firecrackers to intimidate the spirit of the rapids ... The steep shores and inlets were littered with ships’ remains, and with human skeletons.'  But this was also a world of beauty, barely known to Western travellers. 'With its canopied bridges and watermills and temples rising from bamboo and cedar groves, it intoxicated Bird by its sheer luxuriance, and by its conformity to some childhood expectation (the word “picturesque” recurs), as if she were traveling through a timeless Cathay.'

Isabella Bird, A Bridge at Wan Hsien of the Single Arch Type, 1896

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A winding river and a bridge

Jan Van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (detail - full picture below), c. 1435-7

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this year I discussed a miniature in Christopher de Hamel's Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.  Here I want to share a quote from his earlier book, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986, revised 1994).  Its subject, way a landscape is transmitted and through successive works of art, is one I have touched on before in connection with Albrecht Dürer.  The way repetition introduces change is something that has fascinated modern artists, from Warhol's screen prints to Basinski's Disintegration Loops, although in this case the alterations are more deliberate.  The quote is quite long but it it conveys what is so appealing about de Hamel's writing, both highly accessible and rigorously scholarly.  (Incidentally, my parents saw him deliver a talk earlier this month, where he described his discovery of what may be the actual book Thomas Becket was carrying when he was assassinated.)  Here, de Hamel is discussing a Paris-based illuminator called the Bedford Master, named for two books he made for the Duke of Bedford, Henry V's brother and regent of France following the victory at Agincourt.  But the story (probably) begins with one of the greatest fifteenth century paintings, Jan van Eyck's The Madonna and Chancellor Rolin, now in the Louvre.

 

'In the background, seen over the rampart and battlements of a castle, is a marvellous distant view of a winding river and a bridge with people hurrying across and (if one peers closely) a castle on an island and little rowing boats and a landings stage.  It was painted about 1435-7.  The view is now famous as one of the earliest examples of landscape painting.  The Bedford Master must have admired it too, perhaps in Rolin's house where the original was probably kept until it was bequeathed to the church at Autun.  The same landscape was copied almost exactly, even to the little boats and the bends in the river, into the backgrounds of several miniatures from the circle of the Bedford Master such as the former Marquess of Bute MS. 93, fol. 105r, and the mid-fifteenth century Hours of Jean Dunois in the British Library (Yates Thompson MS 3, fol. 162r).  It was adapted slightly for Bedford miniatures such as Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig IX.6, fol. 100r, where the fortified bridge has contracted into part of a castle.  Nicolas Rolin has been transmogrified into David in penance.  In this case, one can assume that Jan Van Eyck had invented the design, unless, of course, he was consciously copying a Bedford Master Book of Hours and was depicting Rolin as penitent.  The scene gets gradually transformed in other manuscripts into the usual view from the palace of King David in the miniature to illustrate the Penitential Psalms in northern France and then in Flanders.  The battlements stay on but the river becomes a lake and then a courtyard (still with little people hurrying to and fro) in the Ghent/Bruges Books of Hours of the sixteenth century.  The Bedford Master's sketch of a detail in a portrait that interested him was transformed remarkably, over a hundred years, as one illuminator after another duplicated and adapted the original pattern.'

 

The circle of the Bedford Master, Idleness in the Penitential Psalms, mid 15th century

Source: British Library

I have found online one of the examples quoted above, the British Library MS, but cannot find images of the others (they are in private collections).  I will end here instead with another painting, less closely copied but still clearly inspired by Van Eyck.  This is Rogier van Der Weyden's wonderful Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, painted just a few years later in around 1440.  The original is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and would be one of the first things I'd head for if I ever get to go there (I can't write this without thinking of Jonathan Richman's song 'Girlfriend'...)  But there are three other versions of it, in Bruges, Munich and St Petersburg.  The figures looking out over the landscape, it's been suggested, refer to the paragone debate, drawing our attention to the ability of painting to convey a vista like this, in a way that sculpture, the art of three dimensions, cannot.  It is as if they are admiring the artistry of Van der Weyden in creating the world they themselves inhabit.  In Van Eyck's painting, the figure looking over the parapet on the right may be the artist himself - the man in the National Gallery's possible-self-portrait is wearing a similar red turban.  In the British Library MS. there is only one man gazing onto the landscape; the second is riding along on a donkey, the personification of idleness with his head in his hand.  But both are wearing versions of Van Eyck's red turban.  

Rogier van Der Weyden, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, c. 1440

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the mist of the secret and solitary hill

"I have given you the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley, both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic Muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who woos her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall."

An illustration to Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, from an edition of 1893

In my last post I wrote about the Chinese poetic ideal of hearing a guqin played in the landscape.  Here in Waverley (1814), the enchanting Flora McIvor is speaking to the eponymous hero, newly arrived in the Highlands, having led him to this perfect location to hear her 'imperfect translations' of Gaelic poetry, to the accompaniment of a harp.  This place of barren rocks and murmuring water might just as easily be the setting for a Chinese 'mountains and rivers' poem.  Making his way there, Waverley had found

'the rocks assumed a thousand peculiar and varied forms. In one place a crag of huge size presented its gigantic bulk, as if to forbid the passenger’s farther progress; and it was not until he approached its very base that Waverley discerned the sudden and acute turn by which the pathway wheeled its course around this formidable obstacle. In another spot the projecting rocks from the opposite sides of the chasm had approached so near to each other that two pine-trees laid across, and covered with turf, formed a rustic bridge at the height of at least one hundred and fifty feet. It had no ledges, and was barely three feet in breadth.'

From this vantage point Waverley had watched Flora cross the bridge, feeling all the emotions we associate with the Sublime.  The editor of the OUP edition of Waverley (Clare Lamont) notes that a similar bridge appeared in Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810), that an actual bridge of this kind existed, spanning Keltie Water, and that there had been other examples of heroines of sensibility crossing Alpine bridges in slightly earlier novels written by Ann Radcliffe and Jane Porter.  Passing under the bridge, Waverley found himself in 'a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher rose eminences and peaks, some bare, some clothed with wood, some round and purple with heath, and others splintered into rocks and crags.'  Then, turning the path, he came to the secluded spot where Flora would sing him her Highland song.

He found Flora gazing at 'a romantic waterfall.  It was not so remarkable either for great height or quantity of water as for the beautiful accompaniments which made the spot interesting.'  The description that follows is based on the falls of Ledard, as Scott explained in his own footnote.  Interestingly, the novel makes clear that this setting was not entirely wild.  'Mossy banks of turf were broken and interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs, some of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously that they added to the grace without diminishing the romantic wildness of the scene.'  Here, with the sun stooping in the west, Waverley gazes at Flora, thinking 'he had never, even in his wildest dreams, imagined a figure of such exquisite and interesting loveliness. The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around seemed to have been created an Eden in the wilderness.'

Reading this, you have the impression that the native Sublimity of the Highlands has somehow been infused with the light of Italy.  In the 1814 edition Scott described Flora by the waterfall as 'like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Claude'.  I have mentioned here before the awkwardness of Claude's figures; soon after publication a correspondent pointed out to Scott that 'Claude's figures are reckoned notoriously bad, & indeed he only used them as vehicles for a little blue, red or yellow drapery to set of his gradation of tints & throw his landscape into distance.'  Scott took his advice and substituted Poussin for Claude in subsequent editions.

Flora begins to sing, sitting on a mossy fragment of rock, 'at such a distance from the cascade that its sound should rather accompany than interrupt that of her voice and instrument [...] A few irregular strains introduced a prelude of a wild and peculiar tone, which harmonised well with the distant waterfall, and the soft sigh of the evening breeze in the rustling leaves of an aspen, which overhung the seat of the fair harpress.'  But her song is not dedicated to Nature, though it begins with the mist on the mountains.  The year is 1745, Flora is an ardent supporter of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Highlanders are about to rise and fight for the Jacobite rebellion.  Waverley, without firm political convictions, a lover of literature, is as yet unaware that the Young Pretender has landed at Glenaladale and raised his standard at Glenfinnan.  About to be caught up in the conflict (like one of those Chinese poets interrupted from their retreat in the mountains by political strife and war), for now he listens innocently, with a 'wild feeling of romantic delight', as Flora sings: 

"  ... the dark hours of night and of slumber are past,
The morn on our mountains is dawning at last;
Glenaladale’s peaks are illumined with the rays,
And the streams of Glenfinnan leap bright in the blaze..."

View of Auvers-sur-Oise

I have been reading A Burglar's Guide to the City by BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh which has interesting things to say about buildings, street patterns and the way urban space is used.  With its focus on illegally entering enclosed structures there is little directly about 'landscape', although I did learn that a popular lock picking tool is a kind of landscape in miniature: the Bogotá rake, 'named because its waves and bends apparently resemble the mountains surrounding Bogotá, Columbia, where the tool was invented.'  Also that there is a thorny plant, trifoliate orange, popular with security conscious landscape designers because it 'is so dense and fast-growing that it can stop speeding vehicles; it is used by the U.S. military to help secure the perimeters of missile silos and armories.'  And that there was a burglar in Oregon

'who dressed up in a ghillie suit, a tangled mass of fake vegetation woven into nets, originally meant to camouflage military snipers by making them indistinguishable from plant life.  Disguised as a plant, he then slipped into his target, which, of all things - because you couldn't make this up, it would be impossible to take seriously in a work of fiction - was a museum of rocks and minerals.  He was after their gold and gemstones.  Simulating one kind of landscape, he broke into a museum of another...'

Stories like this got me thinking about landscape art in a different way, as a target for burglary. A Cézanne painting, View of Auvers-sur-Oise (c. 1879-82) that I've always liked (the postcard I'm holding above was purchased just after I did my A-levels) can no longer be seen because it was stolen on millennium night.  Here's how The Guardian reported the burglary on 3 January 2000.

'The theft of a £3m painting by Paul Cézanne in Oxford on millennium night was carried out by a professional burglar who created a smokescreen to foil security cameras, it was disclosed yesterday.  With the noise of his break-in masked by celebratory fireworks, the burglar cut a hole in the roof of the Ashmolean museum and descended to its art gallery by rope ladder.  He had a holdall containing a scalpel, tape, gloves, a smoke canister and a small fan. He set off the canister, and used the fan to spread the smoke and obscure the view of the gallery's closed circuit cameras. In less than 10 minutes, he had seized the painting, View of Auvers-sur-Oise, climbed up the ladder, and gone.'

There are apparently suspicions that this painting was stolen to order by a collector, obviously not a person to be satisfied with an Ashmolean Museum postcard.  Fortunately art thefts are too rare to consider any prevailing aesthetic in the landscapes targetted.  There's the painting that gave a name to an art movement - Monet's Impression, soleil levant - stolen in Paris by a yakuza gangster; Nebelschwaden by Caspar David Friedrich, taken along with two Turners by thieves who had hidden overnight in a Hamburg gallery; Govaert Flinck's Landscape with an Obelisk, lifted along with other Dutch masterpieces in Boston by a gang dressed up as policemen (one wearing a fake wax mustache); and Marine by Claude Monet, owned by a museum in Rio de Janeiro, which disappeared with its burglars into the carnival crowd, melting into the city like the thief who got away with his Cézanne while millennium fireworks created the perfect diversion.

Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, 1901

Image: Wikimedia Commons, via Rotterdam Police

I will end here with a quote from A Burglar's Guide to the City concerning the role of architecture in a theft involving two more Monet paintings.  The following paragraph is reprinted on the Fast Company website:

'One of the most spectacular art heists of the last decade is thought to have succeeded precisely because of a flaw in a museum’s architectural design, which inadvertently allowed the general public to study the internal patterns of the security guards and visitors. The Kunsthal in Rotterdam, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, was robbed in the middle of the night back in October 2012; seven paintings were stolen, including works by Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, and Picasso. Ton Cremers, founder of the Museum Security Network, an online forum, put some of the blame for this on the building itself: the museum’s expansive floor-to-ceiling windows offered a clear and unobstructed view of many of the paintings hanging inside. More important, they also allowed a constant, real-time surveillance of the internal workings of the museum for anyone passing by—the patterns of visitors and the comings and goings of the guards were effectively on public display. Thus thieves could have sat outside in a nearby park, watching until they found the right moment to strike. The museum had its own internal rhythm of events that the burglars interrupted with a perfectly timed counter-event: the heist. This is the rhythmic spacetime of burglary.'

The Hills, The Valleys, The River, The Sea

The summer's Barbara Hepworth exhibition may have been a bit underwhelming but one exhibit that caught my attention was a display of sketches for sculptures intended for Waterloo Bridge.  Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's design had incorporated four plinths but they were left empty after the bridge was completed in 1942.  When a competition was eventually held in 1947 Hepworth submitted four landscape-related designs: The Hills, The Valleys, The River, The Sea.  But the judges rejected her ideas and those of three other artists: 'the result of the competition was disappointing and we do not consider that any of the four schemes submitted can be adjudged suitable for the position that they are intended to occupy.' 

I won't add much more here because an excellent blog post on these designs has already been written by John Wyver at Illuminations.  You can also go to the Tate website for a detailed account of them by curator Chris Stephens and see the maquette and three sketches.  These images are under copyright so I can't include them here - instead I give you probably the most boring image ever embedded on this site.  My photo makes you wonder whether sculptures on this relatively small scale, attempting to project a sense of the whole landscape through which a river passes, would just have got lost among the cars and commuters.  But we cannot know as they were never made.  It is just possible that they could have caught something of the world beyond this unreal city and brought solace to all those weary people flowing over the bridge 'under the brown fog of a winter dawn'.

Factory chimneys across the River Eden

When we visited Aix-en-Provence and Mont Sainte-Victoire, a couple of years before France adopted the Euro, it was mildly gratifying to be able to pay for things using Paul Cézanne banknotes.  At that time the 50 Franc notes honoured another of my heroes, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  The 20 Franc Debussy notes featured landscapes on both sides: a stormy sea representing La Mer, and scenery for Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), originally painted by Lucien Jusseaume and Eugène Ronsin.  I suppose the Euro notes that replaced these might be seen as having a tangential landscape association, but the bridges on them are really generic symbols rather than specific landmarks (unlike the original designs which included the Rialto Bridge in Venice and the Pont de Neuilly in Paris).  Bridges are popular currency motifs - outside the Eurozone Denmark uses them and here in Britian we can spend five different Bank of Scotland notes, ranging from the 14th century Brig O'Doon (£5) to the Kessock Bridge, completed in 1982 (£100).

Another landscape painter honoured on a banknote is Edvard Munch - he appears with his painting, The Sun on Norway's 1000-kroner note.  There has been a lot of praise this year for the new Norwegian note designs ('the world's coolest currency' according to Slate).  The original Snøhetta Design idea was to pair black and white coastal photographs with pixelated colour versions.  The Norges Bank has kept the pixels but gone for more traditional images on the obverse.  Personally I am even more envious of the new Norwegian passports, designed by Neue, which the Guardian described as 'beautifully simplified depictions of Norway’s natural landscapes drawn with fine lines in pastel shades ... When shone under UV light, the landscapes within the pages transform to show the northern lights in the night sky, a magical touch that adds a deeper sense of intrigue to the already striking document.'

Of course there are many examples of landscapes on banknotes, from the dramatic mountains of Guilin on China's 20 yuan, to the Ulster Bank's vignette's of the Mourne Mountains, Giant's Causeway and Queen Elizabeth Bridge (another one...)  There was a time when individual banks in England as well as other parts of the British Isles issued their own notes. The British Museum site explains how these became increasingly sophisticated in the nineteenth century with the use of steel engraving:

'Printers such as Perkins and Heath in London and W.H.Lizars in Edinburgh exploited this potential to produce exquisite banknote designs combining dazzling machine-engraved patterns – a trademark of Perkins’ firm – with delicate hand-engraved figures and rural scenes that reflected a growing taste for romantic landscape, evident in the popularity of topographical prints, watercolours and poetry. A wonderful note of the Carlisle City and District Banking Company carries a panoramic view of the city with its castle, cathedral, houses and factory chimneys across the River Eden; people stroll in fields in the foreground, while on the far bank cattle are wading and a line of washing is hanging out to dry.' 

This kind of local pride expressed through banknotes seems remote in the era of e-commerce and bitcoins.  Will physical money last any longer than passports or stamps?  I have written here before about landscapes on stamps, which represented the beauty and productive potential of far flung imperial territories.   It would be interesting to compare the iconography of banknotes, which represent financial geography, with stamps that link territories together.  Clearly a lot of thought goes into what they show as well as the ways in which they resist counterfeiters.  The Bank of Canada museum, for example, quotes an internal memo from 1954: 'the traditional ornamentation of bank notes reflects a ‘Victorian’ taste in design….derived from times associated with an immature, colonial status.'  Instead,

'officials at the Bank wanted the notes to feature images of Canadian landscapes that showed little or no evidence of human activity. They chose the final 8 images from over 3,000 photographs supplied from the collections of railways, archives and news agencies. From the Maritimes, through Eastern Canada, the Prairies, the Rockies and the North, what resulted was an extended portrait of The Great Lone Land vision of Canada. This vision was already out-dated, but served as the natural starting point for an evolving manifestation of official identity that would be played out on all future bank notes.'

Bank of Canada 1954 note showing Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, 

engraved by William Ford of the American Bank Note Company

Earlier this year the Huffington Post reported on calls to have a woman on Canadian notes for the first time - their suggestions include Margaret Atwood, Emily Carr (the subject of a retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery that I'll probably be writing about here soon) and, er, Shania Twain ("Canadian country and pop music star, famous for hits such as 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman.'")  Over here there was controversy recently at the announcement that a man (Churchill) would replace a woman, Elizabeth Fry, on the £5 note, until the Bank of England said it was planning to balance things out with Jane Austen on the next £10.  I'll end here on an Icelandic note with another landscape painter, Johannes Sveinsson Kjarval, depicted on the 2000 Kronur.  Björk, who will surely feature on the Icelandic currency herself before too long, named an instrumental after him on the album she recorded as an eleven-year-old in 1977.

The Journey Through Wales

Medieval manuscript of The Journey Through Wales in the British Library

In the spring of 1188 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, set out to travel through Wales recruiting men for the Third Crusade.  He was accompanied by Gerald, Archdeacon of Brecon, whose highly readable account of their journey, Itinerarium Kambriae (The Journey Through Wales, translated by Lewis Thorpe), contains many interesting references to nature and topography.  I have always liked the abecedary form (as in, for example, Kevin Jackson's collection of alphabetical essays Letters of Introduction) and have used it here to list some of the places, sites and unusual natural phenomena Gerald wrote about.  What follows therefore is an A-Z of the Welsh landscape towards the end of the twelfth century.

A is for Arthur's Chair.  A few days after setting out from Hereford, Gerald and Baldwin had reached Brecknockshire.  He describes there a 'lofty spot most difficult of access, so that in the minds of simple folk it is thought to have belonged to Arthur, the greatest and most distinguished King of the Britons'.  Cadair Arthur was the name given to this place, formed by two peaks (Pen y Fan and Corn Du), and at the summit there was a well-shaped pool, fed by a spring, in which trout were sometimes seen.  Gerald mentions King Arthur at several points, drawing on what Geoffrey of Monmouth had written in his History of the Kings of Britain.  More intriguing are descriptions he gave in two later books of the discovery of Arthur's tomb, in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey (Glastonbury, he writes, was once called Ynys Gutrin, 'the Island of Glass, no doubt from the glassy colour of the river which flows around it in the marshland.')

B is for the island of Barry. 'In a rock by the sea where one first lands on the island there is a small crack. If you press your ear to it, you can hear a noise like blacksmiths at work.'  As will be seen below, Gerald usually has stories to associate with unusual landscape phenomena, but this one is simply recorded for what it is.  'One would well imagine that a sound of this sort would come from the sea-waters rushing into hidden orifices beneath the island, but it is no less loud when the waves draw back, and it can be heard just as well when the shore is dry as when the tide is up.'

C is for Caerleon.  The ancient City of the Legions, Caerleon 'is beautifully situated on the bank of the River Usk.  When the tide comes in, ships sail right up to the city.  It is surrounded by woods and meadows.  It was here that the Roman legates came to seek audience at the great Arthur's court.'  Gerald describes a lot more of the Roman city than can be seen today, including its impressive walls.  He found evidence of immense palaces, 'a lofty tower, and beside it remarkable hot baths, the remains of temples and an amphitheatre.' 

D is for St. David.  According to Gerald, this devout man (said to have been the uncle of king Arthur), 'preferring the eremetical existence to the pastoral one', moved the archbishopric from Caerleon, the City of the Legions, to 'a remote corner of the country, looking out towards the Irish Sea.  The soil is rocky and barren.  It has no woods, no rivers and no pasture-lands.  It is exposed to the winds and to extremely inclement weather.'  It was this alleged archbishopric, independent of Canterbury, that Gerald  himself strove unsuccessfully throughout his life to re-establish.  There was a story that Gerald includes in which St. David himself changed the landscape: one day 'in full view of an astonished congregation, the ground on which he was standing rose up in the air.'

E is for Eyri. 'I must not fail to tell you about the mountains which are called Eyri by the Welsh and by the English Snowdon, that is the Snow Mountains.'  Eyri means haunt of the eagles, and Gerald writes of one remarkable eagle that perches on a particular stone every fifth feast day, 'hoping to satiate its hunger with the bodies of dead men, for on that day it thinks that war will break out.  The stone on which it takes its stand has a hole pierced nearly through it, for it is there that the eagle cleans and sharpens its beak.'

F is for a floating island.  This can be found in the mountains of Snowdonia where the strong winds continuously blow it from one bank of a lake to another.  'Shepherds are amazed to see the flocks which are feeding there carried off to distant parts of the lake.  It is possible that a section of the bank was broken off in times long past and that, bound together in a natural way by the roots of the willows and other shrubs which grow there, it has since become larger by alluvial deposits.'

G is for the Golden Rock. This is 'a rocky eminence that dominates the River Severn' which has a gold sheen when struck by the sun. Gerald thinks that 'if someone who was skilled in such work would only dig down into the mineral deposits and penetrate the very entrails of the earth, he might extract sweet honey from the stone and oil from the rock.'

H is for hawk.  At Haverfordwest, the falcons are 'remarkable for their good breeding, and they lord it over the river birds and those in the open fields.'  Gerald concludes one chapter of the book with the story of how one of these noble birds killed Henry II's carefully bred Norwegian hawk.  'As a result from this year onwards Henry II always sent to this region at nesting-time for some of the falcons which breed on the sea-cliffs.  Nowhere in the whole kingdom could he find more noble or more agile birds.  That is enough about falcons.  Now I must return to my journey.' 

I is for the mountains of Ireland.  These can be seen on a clear day from St David's and Gerald writes that when William Rufus came to this spot and looked across the sea from the headland he said "I will collect a fleet together from my own kingdom and with it make a bridge, so that I can conquer that country."  Gerald himself had been in Ireland for a year, travelling there as chaplain and adviser to Prince John in 1185. The Journey Through Wales was Gerald's third book, written after two books on Ireland.

J is for Jerusalem. Gerald had himself taken the cross and his whole party expected to leave for the Holy Land when their mission in Wales was complete.  In 1189 he and Archbishop Baldwin sailed for France but Gerald was sent back to England by the new king Richard, following the death of Henry II.  Baldwin went on and died at the siege of Acre in 1190.  Two years earlier, as he and Gerald approached Bangor along a valley with many steep climbs, they had dismounted in order to practise walking in the exhausting conditions they expected to find on the road to Jerusalem.  'We walked the whole length of the valley and we were very tired by the time we reached the farther end.  The Archbishop sat himself down on an oak-tree, which had been completely uprooted and overturned by the force of the winds, for he needed to rest and recover his breath.'  He asked for a tune to soothe his tired ears and a bird in a near-by coppice started to sing.

K is for the knight and the King.  Gerald tells of 'a knight from Brittany' who was sent by Henry II to see how the land round Dinevor Castle was fortified.  He was conducted by a Welsh priest who took him along the most difficult and inaccessible paths.  'Whenever they passed through lush woodlands, to the great astonishment of all present, [the priest] plucked a handful of grass and ate it, thus giving the impression that in time of need the local inhabitants lived on roots and grasses.'  The knight reported to the King that the land was uninhabitable and the King made the local Welsh leader swear an oath of fealty but left him to his own affairs.

L is for Llanthony. Gerald praises the location of this monastery in the vale of Ewias, so suitable for a life of contemplation.  'As they sit in their cloisters in this monastery, breathing the fresh air, the monks gaze up at distant prospects which rise above their own lofty roof-tops, and there they see, as far as any eye can reach, mountain-peaks which rise to meet the sky and often enough herds of wild deer which are grazing on their summits.'

M is for Manorbier.  Gerald devotes a whole passage to the beautiful landscape surrounding the fortified mansion of Manorbier, visible from a distance on a hill near the sea.  'You will not be surprised to hear me lavish such praise upon it, when I tell you that this is where my family came from, this is where I myself was born.  I can only ask you to forgive me.'  He mentions a fish pond, an orchard, and a ready supply of wheat and wine.  'A stream of water which never fails, winds its way along a valley, which is strewn with sand by the strong sea-winds.'  There is a rocky headland: 'boats on their way to Ireland from almost any part of Britain scud by before the east wind, and from this vantage-point you can see them brave the ever-changing violence of the winds and the blind fury of the waters.'

N is for Newgale Sands Here in the winter of 1171-2 a great wind blew 'with such unprecedented violence that the shores of South Wales were completely denuded of sand, and the subsoil, which had been buried deep for so many centuries, was once more revealed.  Tree-trunks became visible, standing in the sea, with their tops lopped off, and with the cuts made by the axes as clear as if they had been felled yesterday.  The soil was pitch-black and the wood of the tree-trunks shone like ebony.'  This wind was so fierce that it blew fish into the bushes and high rocks, and people came down to collect them. 

O is for one-eyed fish. A lake among the mountains of Snowdonia 'abounds in three different kinds of fish, eels, trout and perch, and all of them have only one eye, the right one being there but not the left.  If the careful reader asks me the cause of such a remarkable phenomenon, I can only answer that I do not know.'

P is for the two pools that burst their banks.  This happened in the Elfael district on the night that Henry I died (1st December 1135).  One was artificial and its water simply rushed down the valley leaving it empty.  'But, remarkably enough, the natural lake reformed itself, with all its fish and whatever else lived in it, in a certain valley not more than two miles away.'   

Q is for quicksand.  Gerald and Baldwin took the coast road from Margam Abbey, fording the river Avon, where they were delayed by the ebbing water, and approached the river Neath.  There they encountered quicksand where Gerald's own pack-horse 'was almost sucked down into the abyss.'  They got him out, but 'not without some damage done to my books and baggage.'  Hurrying made things worse - 'it is better to advance more slowly and with great circumspection over such dangerous terrain as this.'  Eventually they made it to the Neath which they crossed in a boat since it was too dangerous to ford, 'for the passages through the river change with every monthly tide and they cannot be located after a heavy fall of rain.'

R is for Rhyd Pencarn.  Near Newport, Gerald describes a stream that is 'passable only be certain fords, more because of the way in which it has hollowed out its bed and of the muddiness of the marshland which surrounds it than through the depth of its waters.'  Rhyd Pencarn, the 'ford beneath the hanging rock', was the subject of a prophecy by Merlin Sylvester (Gerald believed there had been two Merlins in Wales - this one was Scottish).  Merlin had said that the Welsh would not be beaten by a strong man riding over it with a freckled face, a description that matched the appearance of Henry II.  When Henry did cross the ford in 1163, the Welshmen who watched his approach knew that they would be defeated.  

S is for the magic stone of Anglesey.  This stone in the shape of a human thigh-bone will always return no matter how far it is taken away.  Henry I tested it by throwing it into the sea, attached by chains to a much larger stone - the next morning it was back in its usual place.  'It is also said that if a couple come to have intercourse on this spot, or near by, which they do frequently, great drops of sweat drip from the stone.'  As will be clear by now, Gerald's Wales is scattered with strange rocks and stones.  Also on the island of Anglesey you can find Listener's Rock, and 'if you stand on one side and shout, no one on the other side can hear you.' 

T is for the river Teifi.  In describing this 'noble river', Gerald writes a lengthy digression on the habits of beavers, for this is the only place in Wales where they can be found.  These clever creatures plan their lodges so that they just protrude from the water, building several stories linked with connecting doorways.  'As the years pass and the willow-wands keep on growing, the lodge is constantly in leaf and becomes, in fact, a grove of willow trees, looking like a natural bush from the outside, however artificially constructed it may be within.'

U is for the river Usk.  Gerald says that salmon abound there in summer (whereas the Wye has them in winter).  The finest salmon in Wales can be found in the river Teifi and there is a spot there called Cenarth Mawr where a waterfall roars unceasingly and the fish leap the height of a tall spear into the concave rock above.  When Gerald and his companions reached Usk castle and preached the Crusade a large number of men took the cross, including robbers, highwaymen and murderers.  The road then took them to Newport via Caerleon and they had to cross the river Usk three times.

V is for the Valley of Roses. This was the site chosen for the cathedral of St David's.  Gerald observes that 'a better name for it would be the Valley of Marble, for it is in no sense rosy or remarkable for roses, whereas there are plenty of rocks all over the place.'  One of these rocks was used as a bridge over the River Alun and called Llech Lafar, the Talking Stone. One of the prophecies of Merlin held that a king of England who had just conquered Ireland would die as he walked over this bridge.  As he had at Rhyd Pencarn, Henry II defied this superstition by boldly walking forward.  Calling Merlin a liar, he entered the cathedral to pray and hear Mass.

W is for the waterfowl of Brecknock Mere.  There was an old saying that the rightful ruler of the land could order these birds to sing.  One winter Gruffydd ap Rhys ap Tewdwr (a great uncle of Gerald) did just this.  The water of this lake 'sometimes turns bright green, and in our days it has been known to become scarlet, not all over, but as if blood were flowing along certain currents and eddies.  What is more, those who live there sometimes observe it to be completely covered with buildings or rich pasture-lands, or adorned with gardens and orchards.  In the winter months, when it is covered with ice, and when the surface is frozen over with a smooth and slippery coat, it emits a horrible groaning sound, like the lowing of a vast herd of cattle all driven together in one place.  It is possible, of course, that this is caused by the cracking of the ice and the sudden violent eruptions of enclosed pockets of air through vents imperceptible to the eye.'

X is for Exmes.  Gerald's digressions occasionally take him outside Wales itself - Exmes is actually a castle in Normandy.  Near it there is a certain pool whose fish fought each other so violently on the night Henry II died, 'some in the water and some even leaping in the air, that the noise which they made attracted to the spot a vast crowd of local people.'  This story parallels that of the two pools in Wales (see 'P' above), associated with the death of Henry I. 

Y is for Ynys Lannog. This place, Priest's Island in English, lies off the coast of Anglesey.  Gerald says that if the hermits who live there quarrel, a species of mice who live there will come and consume most of their food and drink 'and befoul the rest.' When the argument is over the mice disappear. 'No women are ever allowed on the island.'

Z is for Zeuxis.  The Journey Through Wales ended where it began, in Hereford.  After completing his account, Gerald wrote a second, shorter book, The Description of Wales.  In its Preface he says that some readers of his earlier topographical writings took exception to the choice of subject matter.  'They see me as a painter who, rich in precious colours, the master of his art, a second Zeuxis, strives with great skill and industry to portray a humble cottage or some other subject by its very nature base and ignoble, when they were expecting me to paint a temple or fine palace.'  But Gerald, on the contrary, was proud of having adorned the rugged country of Wales with 'all the flowers of my rhetoric'.

riverrun

We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here.

On the final page of Finnegans Wake, the River Liffey enters the ocean.  But the book is circular and its last words, spoken by Anna Livia Plurabelle, the personification of the river - 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the' - point back to its opening - 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.'  I was listening to these words at the National Theatre last night in riverrun, a solo performance in which the Irish actor Olwen Fouéré embodies the voice of the river.  Based on the trailer (see above) I imagined this could involve riverine footage and field recordings, but there was just Fouéré and a microphone, carefully lit, with ambient sound designed to immerse you in the experience rather than signify flowing water directly.  Her extraordinary performance has received good write-ups (e.g. in the Telegraph and the Independent), although reviewers have been honest about the inaccessibility of the text - none has claimed to be able to follow exactly what they heard.

'A river is not a woman / ...  Any more than / A woman is a river', wrote Eavan Boland in 'Anna Liffey', a poem published in a collection twenty years ago.  'Anna Liffey' is the name the river has sometimes gone by, an anglicisation of Abhainn na Life.  'It rises in rush and ling heather and / Black peat and bracken and strengthens / To claim the city it narrated. / Swans. Steep falls. Small towns. / The smudged air and bridges of Dublin.'  One of these bridges is now called Anna Livia and the city has also recently acquired a James Joyce Bridge, facing the house where his story 'The Dead' was set.  In a park by the Liffey you can see a sculpture depicting Anna Livia Plurabelle.  She was originally sited on O'Connell Street with water flowing around her long limbs and became known as The Floozy in the Jacuzzi.  However, her presence was insufficient to turn the tide of economic decline and as part of a new plan to regenerate the street she was replaced by a millennium monument, The Spire of Dublin (aka The Stiletto in the Ghetto).  But as the city continues to change around it, the Liffey flows on, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, always back to the ocean.

Earth has not anything to shew more fair

I was going to photograph the view from Westminster Bridge this morning but we've been asked to work from home during the Olympics period, so I took the snaps above with my phone last week.  Two hundred and ten years ago today, Wordsworth admired the city from this same spot, although he dated his famous sonnet September 3rd.  His sister's diary briefly records the moment, a vision of the city seen from the Dover coach, en route to Calais where they would meet Annette Vallon and Wordsworth would see his daughter Caroline for the first time. 'It was a beautiful morning.  The City, St Pauls, with the River & a multitude of little Boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge.  The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of nature's own grand Spectacles.'

Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802

EARTH has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.
This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,—
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Ten years ago, Shakespeare's Globe and The Wordsworth Trust published a commemorative volume, Earth has not any thing to shew more fair, edited by the Trust's director Peter Woolf and the writers Alice and Peter Oswald.  The book contains thirty-seven poems inspired by Wordsworth's, including a couple of re-writes from the point of view of Dorothy.  Most of the poets write about the modern view, which can now be enjoyed from the London Eye (as in Charles Tomlinson's poem) or, from even higher up, in an aeroplane coming in to land (Kona McPhee).  By contrast, 'Composed Underneath Westminster Bridge' (Denise Riley) looks down at the river itself: barges, pigeons and brown particles 'churning through the tide.'  I first read Wordsworth at school in A Choice of Poets and none of us taught from this to compare and contrast Wordsworth's 'sight so touching in its majesty' with Blake's bleak 'London' would be surprised to encounter a poem here like Matthew Caley's 'No Bulwark', which asks us to 'behold the tableau, two crackheads and their spoonlit underchins / 'neath the doubled alcove of a riverbridge.'  Language itself has become degraded in Peter Finch's 'N Wst Brdg', a re-write of Wordsworth's lines as an extended text message. Edwin Morgan looks into the future in 'Sometime upon Westminster Bridge' and sees a swollen Thames, shattered Barrier and the city left to drown.

Westminster Bridge on the cover of A Choice of Poets

In some of the book's other poems, parallels are drawn with different bridges or historical moments on the Thames.  Ciaran Carson makes the link with Monet (who came to England in the autumn of 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian War), contributing a brief imagistic poem entitled 'Claude Monet, The Thames Below Westminster, 1871', which reproduces in words that famous painting of the Houses of Parliament in the mist. Perhaps unsurprisingly those who work in the Houses of Parliament receive short shrift in this collection: Sean O'Brien imagines the bridge 'speaking truth to power' and Alice Oswald stares at 'the regular waves of apparently motionless motion / under the teetering structures of administration.'  She seems to have little time for the people who work round here... 'the weather trespasses into strip-lit offices / through tiny windows into tiny thoughts'. Peter Oswald is equally bleak, imagining  that 'trickles of thinking mingle with the flow / from pipes of every kind' and seep into the river - 'the squeezed out city's boil of poisons / stirred to one colour by the rush to ocean.'  But it doesn't always feel like this, and those of us who love London, despite everything, will always love Wordsworth's poem for the way it conveys the beauty of certain sunlit mornings, when dull would he be who would pass by such a sight, so touching in its majesty.

Detail of the plaque on Westminster Bridge

The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin

Michele Marieschi, The Rialto Bridge from the Riva del Vin, 1737

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The National Gallery's recent exhibition 'Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals' set the works of Canaletto alongside other Venetian painters like Luca Carlevarjis, whose choice of views and festivals at the start of the eighteenth century were a model for the later artists, Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto's nephew who left to work at the courts of northern Europe (I included one of his views of Warsaw in an earlier post), and Francesco Guardi, whose poetic vision of the city looks forward to Turner.  Perhaps unsurprisingly given the theatricality of Venice, three of the artists in the exhibition began as scene painters: Canaletto himself, his early rival Michele Marieschi, and Antonio Joli.  Canaletto's father was a scene painter and so was his brother.  At this time the trade was often passed to the next generation and the Galli-Bibiena family, who were designing theatrical sets around Europe throughout the eighteenth century, can be seen to have influenced some of Marieschi's compositions.  Antonio Joli worked in the theatre at Modena and Perugia before coming to Venice.  He later visited England, decorating the house of John James Heidegger, director of the King's Theater at Haymarket and a renowned producer of Venetian-style masquerades.

The National Gallery podcast recently had a brief interview with theatrical historian Julie Dashwood on the influence of theatre design on Venetian view paintings.  She discusses perspective, lighting and framing before the interviewer turns to one of Joli's paintings showing the Doge’s Palace, Campanile and St Mark’s Square seen from the waters of the Bacino di San Marco.  "This surely can’t have anything to do with set designs? I mean ships and boats and the rest of it, can it?" "It can," replies Dashwood.  "The Renaissance stage - and in this the baroque stage is not a break, it’s a continuity of what happened in the Renaissance - they loved special effects. And they loved being able to create the effect of water and rain on stage and bringing in all kinds of machines. They had cloud machines – you can see the clouds here.  ... Of course Joli is able to bring it all into one painting and he creates a sort of stage ... the darkened auditorium if you like is on one side and the real action, the big-wigs, the grandees are coming in to play up their parts on the water, which is their stage, and then going into the city, which is their stage."

Greta Bridge

John Sell Cotman, Greta Bridge c1805

In 1980 Phaidon published a Companion to Art and Artists in the British Isles which divides the country into regions and discusses the places with which artists have been associated. I’ve used it here to consider the connections between art and landscape in one of the books’ nine regions, the North.

• Many northern artists left to work in London and elsewhere, but there are artists born in the region of who seem to have been strongly influenced by the local landscape. There was John Martin, for example, for whom ‘the wild scenery around Haydon Bridge, especially Allendale Gorge, had undoubtedly helped foster his lifelong fascination for the terrifying and the spectacular.’ Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were born in Castleford and Wakefield respectively – Moore later recalled the influence of a sculptural rocky outcrop called Adel Crag. The urban landscape also influenced artists, like Vorticist Edward Wadsworth, whom Wyndham Lewis described as a genius of industrial England just as much as John Crome was a genius of agricultural England. In its caption for View of a Town (c1918) the Tate says that Wadsworth ‘took Wyndham Lewis on a tour of some of Yorkshire’s cities including Halifax. Lewis recalled, ‘He stopped the car and we gazed down into its blackened labyrinth. I could see he was proud of it. “It’s like Hell, isn’t it?” he said enthusiastically’

• Other artists stayed in the North and became associated with particular landscapes, the most famous I suppose being L.S. Lowry in Manchester. Lowry was taught by the Frenchman Auguste Valette whose ‘impressionistic canvases show loney, stylized figures set against a foggy gloom.’ Other notable local painters include Atkinson Grimshaw, who lived in Leeds all his life and specialised in moonlit scenes, the Liverpool pre-Raphaelites William J. J. C. Bond and William Davis, who painted Wirral landscapes, and Ethel Walker, based at Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire. But one of the most interesting is one of the first English landscape painters, Francis Place, who lived mostly in York. As the Tate site says, Place ‘made various sketching tours of the north of England. He often travelled on foot, and worked outdoors on the spot... Such activity was so unusual at the time that he was arrested as a spy, suspected of involved in a Catholic plot.’

• Then there are artists who came to live in the north, like landscape painter Julius Caesar Ibbotson, who moved to Masham in Yorkshire in 1805, near the home of his patron William Danby. John Ruskin first visited the Lakes at the age of five and eventually moved north to live in Coniston Water in 1871. Another more surprising resident of Cumbria was Dadaist Kurt Schwitters who painted some local scenes to make money while working on his Merzbarn. The best known artists’ colony in the region was at Staithes, a fishing village ‘discovered’ in the 1880s by Gilbert Foster.

• The Companion’s authors Michael Jacobs and Malcolm Warner note with some surprise that the Romantic landscape painters were more attracted to the Yorkshire landscape than the Lake District. Thomas Girtin, for example, was one of many to depict Kirstall Abbey, Turner used to stay at Farnley with his patron Walter Ramsden Hawkes, and James Ward painted the famous view of Gordale Scar now in the Tate. Another visitor to Yorshire was John Sell Cotman, who stayed at Rokeby Hall in 1805 (in 1814 the owner of this Palladian manor, classical scholar John Morritt, would purchase a Velazquez painting that’s now known as The Rokeby Venus). Here Cotman discovered the landscape around Greta Bridge and painted some of the most celebrated watercolours in the history of art.

• Finally, there is the modern trend for sculpture parks and site-specific works. The Companion mentions David Nash’s carvings and constructions along the Silurian Way in Grizedale Forest. However, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park had only just been set up when the book was written and the Angel of the North wasn’t even a gleam in Antony Gormley’s eye...

James Ward, Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale) c1812-14

The Tate exhibition A Picture of Britain had a similar aim to the Companion and it included a section on ‘The Romantic North’ which features some of the same artists.

I was wondering what a 2008 edition of the Companion would need to include. Not just landscape art of course – it would have to feature art about the people and history of the north, like Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave. But in terms of landscape, the safest bet would be Andy Goldsworthy, surely the best-known northern artist working in the diffuse modern field of 'land art'. Photographers like Fay Godwin and John Davies spring to mind too, but it occurred to me that there were hardly any photographs in the original Companion (no Roger Fenton, for example, whose image of Furness Abbey I have mentioned here). Photography now seems inseperable from art, but perhaps this was still not quite the case when the Companion was compiled.

Manhatta

I first saw Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) at the ICA in the early nineties. They didn't have a soundtrack so we sat and watched it in silence, just listening to each other coughing or shifting position occasionally. I thought it was great, and still prefer it to Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Dziga Vertov's famous experimental film, another 'city symphony', mostly set in Odessa. Both of these were predated by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's six minute New York film Manhatta, made in 1920. Like Ruttmann's film of Berlin, Manhatta spans a day in the life of a city, from footage of Staten Island ferry commuters to the final scene of sun setting over the Hudson River. You can see the film at the Met website [Postscript: I am now able to embed it from Youtube.]

Other examples of city symphonies? Regen (Rain) a poetic ten minute film from 1929 directed by Joris Ivens, for which Hans Eisler later composed a soundtrack in 1941, 'Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain'. Ivens' earlier film The Bridge (1927) is similar, showing on a drawbridge in Rotterdam. Both can be seen at Ubuweb. In France there was Rien que les heures (1926), Alberto Cavalcanti's film about Paris, and Jean Vigo's A Propos de Nice (1929). Keith Beattie writes that the 'subtitle of Ruttmann's film was applied to numerous films within which practices of visual kinaesthesia constructed a 'symphony' based on the diurnal cycle of life in the modern metropolis, while simultaneously infusing avant-gardist perspectives with a historically and politically cognizant form of social criticism.' At a simple level, as Scott MacDonald has noted, the city symphonies were the flipside of contemporary documentaries like Nanook of the North which brought the exotic to cinema audiences: these films instead exoticised the familiar life of the city.

These films are obviously rich in poetic cityscapes and Charles Sheeler actually used the footage he and Strand created as inspiration for paintings. Robert Hughes in American Visions writes that 'one shot in Manhatta looked down at a train on the Church Street elevated railway sliding into view; Church Street El, 1920, takes this image, colors it and cleans it up, abstracts it, but leaves it essentially recognizable.'

Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920

Source: Mark Harden