Earlier this week, writing about Tirzah Garwood, I referred to landscapes in art that appear uncanny because they contain outsize plants or objects (I might also have mentioned Paul Nash's Event on the Downs - see my earlier post 'Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting'). Here is another example, a giant mushroom that can be seen in the fascinating Royal Academy exhibitionAstonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. In the catalogue Rose Thompson says that 'very little is known about his depiction of a poisonous mushroom. In a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape, the drawing reveals a hidden secret: a ghostly human face trapped within the mushroom's stem.' Most of Hugo's paintings involve pen, brown ink and wash - see for example the The Octopus I included here back in 2012 - but many, like Mushroom - incorporate additional media. Here he has added charcoal, crayon and green, red and white gouache.*
Hugo made topographical sketches in France, northern Spain, Luxembourg and Germany, but he didn't travel much compared to contemporaries who explored the Mediterranean and near East. Many of the landscapes in this exhibition are imaginary, with mysterious buildings half submerged in mist or doubled as reflections in water. He incorporated random and accidental effects in a manner that can be likened to the blot landscapes advocated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Cozens. He can also be seen as a proto-surrealist, interested in the unconscious and experimenting with ways to abandon control in his drawing processes. A couple of miniature landscape paintings in the exhibition particularly struck me for their Romantic atmosphere. Undergrowth c. 1847 is 7.3 x 4.5cm seems to show some trees or grass - it is hard to tell at this scale. The Abandoned Parkis even smaller, just 4.4 by 3.5cm - about the size of a stamp. It looks like a tiny experiment but Hugo had it engraved and it was published in a magazine, L'Artiste in 1855. Hugo also tried out new approaches in his paintings of castles, e.g. making stencils to create either positive or negative silhouettes that he could then paint over. The Guardian website has a splendid gallery of these 'burg' pictures which gives a good indication of his range of approaches.
Victor Hugo, The Abandoned Park, before 1855
*Coincidentally, another great writer-artist, August Strindberg, also painted a strange landscape with a single mushroom in the foreground: Solitary Fly Cap (recently sold at Sotheby's).
Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway
I've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Film which can be seen as an extension of the brilliant free-to-access BFI Victorian Film archive. For example, she discusses Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway, a 'sedately paced' landscape film which the BFI website describes thus:
This beautiful film, shot in February 1898, has a dream-like quality
and is hand tinted (possibly stencilled). It is believed to have been
coloured some time after it was first shown as no contemporary reviews
or advertisements refer to what would surely have been a major
selling/talking point, 1898 being very early for coloured films.
This film was made in response to the first American phantom
train ride film (by the British Mutoscope and Biograph's parent company,
the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), 'The Haverstraw Tunnel',
which showed the scenery around the Hudson river and a tunnel and so
delighted the audience that the British operation decided to make their
own version, which also proved very popular - it showed not only in
London but also in Rochester, New York, and then travelled all over
Europe, still being shown in cinemas as late as 1910. This film is
preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands.
Dixon's chapter 'Moving Images: Panoramas, Phantom Rides and Travel' explains that the first travel film made from a moving vehicle was Alexander Promio's Panorama du Grand Canal pris d'un bateaux, shot from a gondola on 25 October 1896. There are several versions of this uploaded on YouTube and I've embedded one of them below. Two years later Biograph produced Panoramic View of the Vegetable Market at Venicewith a large format camera that gives a remarkably clear, almost 3D stereoscopic effect. Such films can be related in their subjects and composition to earlier picturesque views in art, as well as the more recent phenomenon of moving panoramas (views unfurled on rolled-up cotton with a lecturer explaining each scene). A little later we get more Italian travelogues with more than one shot - Visit to Pompeii(1901) is 8 minutes long and features a 360-degree pan of the ruins, a lovely misty view of Vesuvius with sheep providing motion in the foreground and then a ride up the volcano's funicular railway (another version of the 'phantom train ride'). One more to recommend you look at is Ride on the Peak Tramway (1900), filmed in Hong Kong, which has a grainy, mesmerising quality. 'As the tram crests the peak it's just possible to see the huge vista of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon laid out before us, as if viewed from the world's greatest natural rollercoaster.'
Another interesting genre discussed in Bryony Dixon's book is the sea wave film. 'Nearly every report of early film screening mentions audience reaction to films of sea waves. Films showing the movement of water were very popular for their mesmeric effect as well as for the initial shock they gave audiences at their feeling of 'absolute realness''. She quotes a reaction to Birt Acres' early Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - "It is not too much to say that persons seated near the screen must have shrunk from the approaching billows which gathered, lifted their foam-tossed crests, curled and crashed down with an absolute realism from which nothing was wanted but the roar." Again there are obvious precedents in art and recent photography (Acres was himself a photographer). Cecil Hepworth's film Rough Seas Breaking on Rocks (1899) reminds me of the 'rough seas' genre of postcards I wrote about here in 2011. Dixon lists other examples but notes in particular 'the beautiful Sea Cave Near Lisbon, filmed by Henry Short for Robert Paul in 1896, in which Portugal's famous Boca di Inferno (Mouth of Hell) frames the waves swirling and smashing against the rocks.'
For various reasons it's much harder at the moment for me to go to exhibitions than it used to be, but I did pop down yesterday to the National Gallery to see Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited. These five views (two of them in my photograph above) were painted in 1756-8 when Bellotto was court painter to August III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. I last mentioned Bellotto back in 2007 after I had seen the recently restored Bellotto room
of the Royal Palace in Warsaw. I would love one day to visit Königstein which looks still looks spectacular in photographs. The fortress was still being used as a prison until 1922 and among its famous inmates was Frank Wedekind, author of the Lulu plays, who got into trouble for some satirical verses. Here are a few observations on the five views from left to right as they appear in the exhibition:
The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Brunnenhaus
One of two views inside the fortress. Its rows of railings, windows and chimneys drawing your attention to the painting's lines of perspective. As you get closer your attention is drawn to the figures of guards and gardeners and you begin to wonder about individuals like a beggar leaning against a wall and a man walking along in traditional Polish costume. The light picks out peeling walls, blossoms in the garden and a dog's upturned face.
The Fortress of Königstein from the North
The first of three broader landscape views, with the castle lit more brightly than the forerground and tiny soldiers visible on its ramparts. The ground sloping up to the castle is interesting in itself, with holes worn into the bare sandstone. Again the figures in the scene suggest unknowable stories - a tired looking herdsman, a coach and horses heading off into the distance...
The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West
Here there is a second mountain, the Lilienstein, repeating the shape of the castle. In the distance a dark rain cloud casts shadows on the plain. The foreground is spotlit like a stage, although the pastoral figures arranged on it seem rather contrived. On the slope below the fortress there is a kind of doorway - the entrance to an underground dungeon.
The Fortress of Königstein from the South-West
This one has a diagonal composition (see photo, right) and the massive sandstone castle wall resembles an impregnable cliff. By this time I was starting to get a feel for the geography of the place, spotting towers from the other paintings and orientating myself imaginatively through the given directions.
The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg
The final view includes a building that was apparently home to a 60,000 gallon cask of wine! The figures dotted around range from two gentleman and a lady apparently admiring a carved doorway to some washerwomen laying out laundry. The stained, cracked walls are beautifully painted and the whole scene takes place under a cool blue sky that made me long to be far away from rainy London.
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg, 1756-8
Back in July Jonathan Jones in The Guardiangave this little exhibition a five star review. He claims Bellotto is a 'forgotten artist' and that the Seven Years' War in which he got caught up is a 'little known conflict'... Nevertheless he does make a good point about the atmosphere of these works which I'll quote:
A delicate white kiosk balances on a cliff edge among green trees, suggesting this has become a pleasure park, but near it is a much older tower from days of feudal war. The fortress appears daunting from certain angles, oddly elegant from others. Which is the real mood: coffee and Handel concerts – or defensive might?
The works have an aura of decay that might suggest Dracula’s castle, if there wasn’t so much life here. It looks as if the entire Dresden court are whiling away their time in the castle precincts, waiting for the Prussians to come.
Laura Cumming's review is more informative and I'll conclude with a quote from her about the way these scenes mix landscape with human interest.
Wandering through these scenes, the eye is taken
dramatically into a doorway, up to a balcony strewn with washing, or
down to the facade of a church and then back out through the landscape
to a dark and distant quietude beyond – a faraway land, unknown and
stirring, where hermits might be found in caves, or Nosferatu in a
haunted castle. ... Trysts
succeed and fail; pot plants slowly decline on high windowsills. Carts
bring food effortfully up to the fortress. But down below, where we are,
at eye level, the rural world continues through the seasons as if the
big people had nothing to do with them. And in some profound sense this
was true.
Before leaving for our Easter break in Northumberland I had joked about shivering on beaches in a freezing North Sea wind. However, I hadn't appreciated how beautiful the effect of this would be, with a layer of sand swirling constantly across the surface - see my brief clip below. Watching back the video footage I took over the course of a week it sounds as if there was a constant howling gale. In one sequence on Lindisfarne I can be heard saying excitedly to the camera that the birdsong is just as you can hear it on Chris Watson's album, In St Cuthbert's Time, but none of it can be made out above the wind. It was different when we were there though, sitting among the stones on the shore, near the ruins of Lindisfarne Abbey, listening to the cry of the eider duck that is so prominent in the Lencten section of In St Cuthbert's Time. I wrote in an earlier post about hearing these recordings at Durham Cathedral in the quiet of a chapel; on Holy Island we were able to hear these sounds unmediated, carried over the water on the wind.
Earlier this month there was a short programme on the BBC called 'Into the Wind'. It followed Tim Dee as he talked of the ways the wind shapes his experiences of walking and birdwatching. An accompanying piece in the Guardian, 'The Man Who Interviewed the Wind', provoked the inevitable below the line jokes (from which I learnt the meaning of 'Dutch oven' - not a piece of landscape vocabulary that will find its way into Robert Macfarlane's word hoard), but also explains how Tim uses the natural soundscape in his work as a radio producer. 'Turning to record a little minute of the wind lets me experience the
place beyond human talk. On good days, in good places, I can sense
myself joined to a landscape. It is the wind that carries me there.' The programme ends with a dramatic wide-angle view of Tim pointing his microphone towards the vast mudflats of the Wash to record the wind as it surges in from the North Sea.
As Chris Watson pointed out in one of the BBC's Tweets of the Day, the sound of the eider duck is often thought to resemble that of Frankie Howerd. I found myself wondering if Cuthbert ever felt goaded by it - in Bede's Life of St Cuthbert the monks are constantly vigilant against temptation, 'our loins ever girt against the snares of the devil and all temptations'. The sounds on In St Cuthbert's Time give a peaceful impression of monastic life, but perhaps the cries of the seabirds could be a torment to monks in search of spiritual purity. 'How often have the demons tried to cast me headlong from yonder rock,' Cuthbert told visitors to his hermitage on Inner Farne. Although he was an active missionary, his life looks like a series of steps to free himself from the world. After entering the monastery of Melrose as a boy, he eventually joined the priory of Lindisfarne, easily accessible only at low tide, then isolated himself on what is now St Cuthbert's island - an islet next to Lindisfarne also regularly cut off by the sea - before leaving the priory altogether to live as a hermit on the Farne Islands. There the walls of his cell were such that all he could see was the sky, so that 'eyes and thoughts might be kept from wandering.'
A raven brings pig's lard to Cuthbert on Farne
from the Yates Thomson MS of Bede's Life of Cuthbert, c. 1200
We took a boat trip to Inner Farne, the small island where Cuthbert lived as a hermit from 676. It is now managed as a nature reserve by the National Trust and their rangers make do with no running water ("we might smell a bit as we only shower once a week"). Cuthbert, according to Bede, found a well there with the help of God. He also persuaded the birds not to eat his crops and shamed a pair of ravens into bringing him a gift of pig's lard - incidents depicted in medieval illuminated manuscripts. Cuthbert is celebrated now for conserving the eider ducks, instituting one of the first bird protection laws. However, the language of Bede in his Life of St Cuthbert is very much about mastery over nature. In Chapter 21, Cuthbert is aided by the sea itself, which deposits with the tide a length of wood just right for his dwelling. 'It is hardly strange that the rest of creation should obey the wishes and commands of a man who has dedicated himself with complete sincerity to the Lord's service. We, on the other hand, often lose that dominion over creation which is ours by right through neglecting to serve its Creator.'
Guillemots on Inner Farne
The tide times meant that we arrived early on Lindisfarne, before anywhere was open, and so while the others ambled over the beach I tried to do some sketching. Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner both came here within a year of each other at the end of the eighteenth century and drew the interior of the ruined priory. Girtin's crumbling columns were influenced by seeing the way Piranesi had depicted the ruins of Rome. Cuthbert himself must have known more Roman remnants than we see in northern Britain today; in the Life he visits Carlisle and is shown an old Roman fountain set into the city walls. Now the medieval priory, built on the site of the original one that the monks, fleeing the vikings, abandoned in 875, lies exposed to the wind. There is less of it standing than there was when Turner came here in 1797. Girtin's paintings of the priory 'emphasised the fact that it had been untouched by the hand of improvers' (Greg Smith, Thomas Girtin: The Art of Watercolour). In them, and in Turner's drawings, the ground is uneven and overgrown, very different from the green lawns maintained today by English Heritage.
Lindisfarne has a castle, built in 1550, the subject of dramatic paintings by both Girtin and Turner, renovated in Arts and Crafts style by Lutyens. It is now being restored again and is inaccessible, covered in scaffold. We were able though to see nearby the little garden designed by Lutyens' friend Gertrud Jekyll, sheltered inside a dry stone wall. Before leaving the island, we walked some way round the coast, listening again to the eider ducks. We past that point where some figures can be seen in Girtin's painting, grouped around a fire. The way he shows the smoke blowing suggests the strength of the wind on the island. I will conclude here with a story in the Life of St Cuthbert that concerns wind and fire. One day, Cuthbert was staying in the home of a holy woman, who rushed in to warn him that a house in the village was alight. Cuthbert told her to keep calm and 'he went out and lay full length in front of the door. Before he had finished praying the wind had changed to the west and put the house the man of God had entered completely out of danger.' Bede concludes that God will 'give us grace, unworthy though we are, to extinguish the flames of vice in this world, and escape flames of punishment in the next.'
Reading the new translations of Walter Benjamin's radio broadcasts, made between 1929 and 1932,you are aware of how quickly the world in which they went out would disappear. The final set of programmes about the catastrophes of history now seems to point towards the disaster that would shortly engulf Germany and eventually Benjamin himself. The broadcaster was, in Benjamin's imagination, a guest in people's homes but, as Peter Conrad wrote in his review of Radio Benjamin, 'when the Nazis took control of Germany’s airwaves, such
polite protocols were suspended. A welcome guest no longer dispensed
sage advice or told cautionary stories; instead, one man harangued a
crowd, shouting tirades at top volume.' How many Berlin Youth Hour listeners, you wonder, would grow up to fight in the Wehrmacht ten years later?
The programme I want to highight here, 'Fontane's Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg', begins with the idea that the landscape surrounding the city was 'discovered by the youth of Berlin'. This Wandervogel movement would soon be outlawed, along with other groups distinct from the Hitler Youth. However, as its title indicates, the main subject of Benjamin's broadcast was not these young walkers, or the wider groups of Bündische Jugend. What he proceded to talk about was a remarkable topographical project, conceived one day in 1858 on Loch Levan in Scotland, by Theodor Fontane.
'In the middle of the loch lies an island, and on the middle of the island, half hidden behind ash trees and black firs, rises an old Douglas castle, the Loch Levan Castle of song and legend. On returning to land by boat, the oars rapidly engaged, the island became a strip, finally disappearing altogether, and for a while, only as a figure of the mind, the round tower remained before us on the water, until suddenly our imagination receded further into its memories and older images eclipsed the images of this hour. They were memories of our native land, an unforgotten day. It was the image of Rheinsberg Castle that, like a Fata Morgana, hovered over Loch Levan...'
In that moment Fontane realised that the landscape made famous by Walter Scott was really no more beautiful than the sandy terrain of his native Mark Brandenburg. And so he began his wanderings, selecting material to write about like 'a walker picking individual ears of grain'. In 1860 he wrote to his friend Theodor Storm that the result might run to twenty volumes; in the event it was published in five, between 1862 and 1889. The result was, as Benjamin told his listeners, 'far more than tedious descriptions of landscapes and castles, these books are full of stories, anecdotes, old documents, and portraits of fascinating people.' It is not hard to imagine this appealing to Benjamin. It sounds as if it would be enjoyed by English readers too if a modern selection were published, perhaps by an editor/translator looking, like Benjamin, to illuminate our understanding of culture and social change. Although Fontane's novels have appeared in English (Before The Storm is one of my father's favourite books), I've not come across a translation of the Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg, either in full or abridged form.
Carl Blechen, Rural Landscape in the Mark Brandenburg, c. 1831-8
Benjamin concluded this broadcast with his own description of the broad, expansive landscape of the Mark - quoted below again in the translation by Lecia Rosenthal - and some verse by Fontane that hardly needs to be translated.
'Its sandy, marly soil does not lend itself to strong shapes; however, one is occasionally surprised to come across a steep precipice, or a gorge ripped into the earth. But the plain of the Mark, with its birch forests and cast acres of fields stretching to the horizon like a broad sea of gray and green, is the landscape's most beautiful feature. It is so shy, subtle, and unobtrusive that sometimes, at sundown, on the water amid pillars of pine, you think you're in Japan, and other times, in the limestone hills of Rüdersdorf, you imagine yourself in the desert, until the names of the villages here call you back to reality. Fontane strung some of these names together in a few light and airy lines, which we close with today.
And on this tapestry's flourishing seam
the laughing villages prosper and teem:
Linow, Lindow,
Rhinow, Glindow,
Beetz and Gatow,
Dreetz and Flatow,
Bamme, Damme, Kriele, Krielow,
Petzow, Retzow, Ferch am Schwielow,
Zachow, Wachow and Groß-Behnitz,
Marquardt-Ütz at Wublitz-Schlänitz,
Senzke, Lenzke and Marzahne,
Lietzow, Tietzow and Rekahne,
And lastly a garland of lively haunts:
Ketzin, Ketzür and Vehlefanz.'
Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg
Footnote: Michael Rosen's excellent programme on the Benjamin broadcasts can be heard on the BBC archive. Although he doesn't explore the countryside of the Mark
Brandenburg, he visits the Benjamin archive in Berlin and locations described
in the original programmes .
In sixteenth century Antwerp there was a shop selling prints with the lovely name, Aux Quatre Vents. It was set up by by Hieronymus Cock in 1548 and run with his wife, Volcxken Dierix, who continued the business for thirty years after Cock's death in 1570. They were highly successful, as might be inferred from their motto, 'let the cock cook what the people (volcx) want'. The great Pieter Bruegel came to work for Cock at the start of his career, in the mid 1550s, and designed a series of twelve Large Landscapes based in part on what he had observed during his recent travels over the Alps and in Italy. As the Met site notes, these engravings (actually executed by the brothers Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum), 'among the most widely circulated and celebrated of Bruegel's images, allowed a large audience to become acquainted with his strikingly naturalistic and broad-eyed conception of landscape.' The British Museum has the only surviving drawing for these etchings (below) - its odd title may be a
mistake in Latin for the more appealing sounding Solitudo Rustica
('Rustic Solitude').
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Solicitudo Rustica (Country Concerns), ca. 1555
Engraving in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam - Wikimedia Commons
What could a customer of Aux Quatre Vents have purchased? Cock himself designed a series of topographical engravings of Roman sites based on his own time there (1546-8) and they may have influenced Bruegel in paintings like The Tower of Babel (the walls of which are reminiscent of the Colosseum). Last year's exhibition on Hieronymus Cock in Leuven included (according to Jamie Edwards of the University of Birmingham) a monumental monograph
on the Baths of Diocletian, 'the very first published
architectural monograph of its kind, which is staggering for both its
physical size and its visual richness.' Cock also printed a series based on drawings by his older brother Matthys, Various sorts of landscapes with fine histories composed therein, from
the Old and New Testaments, and several merry Poems, very convenient for
painters and other connoisseurs of the arts (1558). Matthys was later included (with his brother) in the canon-forming collection of twenty-three portraits of 'celebrated painters of Lower Germany' by Dominicus Lampsonius, published by Volcxken Dierix in 1572. The Latin poem underneath includes a pun on the word 'Cock': 'Tu quoque, Matthia, sic pingere rura sciebas, / Ut tibi vix dederint tempora nostra parem.' ('You too, Matthias, knew how to paint fields in such a way, that our age has scarcely produced your equal.')
Matthys Cock
This engraving is from the 1612 expanded version (69 portraits) by Hendrik Hondius I
Matthys Cock, Landscape with Castle above a Harbour, 1550
Drawing in the National Gallery of Art, Washington - Wikimedia Commons
Perhaps the most intriguing Aux Quatre Vents productions on a landscape theme appeared in 1559 and 1561. Their artist is unknown and has come to be known as the Master of the Small Landscapes. He is credited with turning painters away from the panoramic 'world landscapes' of Joachim Patinir (c. 1460-1524) to the kind of modest scenes familiar to us from seventeenth century Dutch art. This influence spread through a 1612 set of engravings produced in Amsterdam by Claes Jansz. Visscher (it has been argued that they would have provided buyers with a nostalgic view of the Brabant countryside prior to the revolt of the Seventeen Provinces, territory that had recently been ceded to the Spanish). But who was the original Master? The Visscher prints were credited to Bruegel but various other contenders have been proposed. Was it the relatively obscure Joos van Liere? Or Cornelis Cort, who worked for Cock and was named as the prints' author in a 1601 re-issue? Or Hieronymus Cock himself? It is not impossible that one day scholarly detective work will reveal a hitherto unknown independent landscape artist...
The Master of the Small Landscapes, Landscape with farms and a herdsman, 1559-61
You have to love Horace Walpole - aesthete, antiquary, art historian, man of letters, man of enthusiasms, inventor of the Gothic novel and designer of the extraordinary house at Strawberry Hill. Simon Schama has a good story in Landscape and Memory about the young Walpole seeking out picturesque scenery in the Alps. Walpole wrote, "I had brought with me a little black spaniel of King Charles’s breed, but the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature! I had let it out of the chaise for the air, and it was waddling along, close to the head of the horses, on top of one of the highest Alps, by the side of a wood of firs. There darted out a young wolf, seized poor Tory by the throat, and before we could possibly prevent it, sprung up the side of the rock and carried him off." As Schama says, 'Walpole was the son of the formidable Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, and until the lamentable encounter with the wolf had obviously enjoyed having a silk-eared, sycophantic ‘Tory’ in his lap.'
Tory wasn’t the only pet of Walpole’s that met a sticky end. When his cat drowned in a goldfish bowl it prompted Thomas Gray, Walpole’s traveling companion in the Alps, to write his ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’ (1748):
‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below…
When Selima reached out for a fish she ‘tumbled headlong in. Eight times emerging from the flood / She mewed to every watry god, Some speedy aid to send.’ But all in vain. And thus Gray warned ‘ye beauties’ (women!) ‘not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes / And heedless hearts is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters gold.’
This Chinese vase can be seen in a wonderful exhibition currently showing at the V&A, along with other items from Walpole's collection: Renaissance maiolica, medieval coins, a French suit of armour, an Italian shield, old master paintings, portait miniatures (he was an expert on these), a sixteenth century book of swan marks, Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Dr Dee's mirror, a lock of Mary Tudor's hair and a carved limewood cravat which Walpole wore, together with the 'gloves of James I', to greet a party of guests to Strawberry Hill in 1769. Some exhibits reminded me of objects I've considered on this blog before. For example, there were two views of Strawberry Hill by Paul Sandby, part of a Sheldon tapestry, and a cup and saucer in the style of Wedgwood's Green Frog Service with delicate painted views of Richmond Castle, the Mausoleum at Castle Howard and Stoke Gifford in Gloucestershire. Walpole, like Bruce Chatwin, loved the stories connected with objects. It's easy to see how desirable, for example, he would have found Alexander Pope's own copy of The Iliad, the very book used to make Pope's celebrated translation. This small volume has a sketch on the flyleaf drawn by the poet himself, showing Twickenham seen from Pope's Grotto.
Last week I wrote about landscapes viewed from a specific house, where the real subject of the painting is the house itself. Walpole commissioned sketches of this kind, including a striking View from the Holbein Chamberby Joseph Charles Barrow, in which two figures are seen approaching through a strange tunnel of trees, like characters in a Gothic novel. However, the most unusual painting in the exhibition is a dream landscape in which a distant hill takes on the form of a lion and a nearby tree is full of snakes. Painted in 1759 by Walpole's friend Richard Bentley, who helped design the Gothick rooms of Strawberry Hill, its title is A Prospect of Vapourland.
Johann Heinrich Müntz, Strawberry Hill, c. 1755-59
The photograph I have behind the title of this blog was taken at Maiden Castle in Dorset. The path through the grass reminded me of Richard Long but the green slopes of the castle itself are also reminiscent of recent land art. In an article in the January edition of the BBC's Garden's Illustrated, Ambra Edwards places Maiden Castle at the start of her chronology of landforms:
The ancient earth sculptures - ziggurats, pyramids, barrows, henges, tumuli and forts
The re-shaping of the land for Renaissance gardens, like Donato Bramante's terraces and ramp for the Belvedere Court of the Vatican
Mounts like those at Hampton Court and Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire
Charles Bridgman's military-inspired ramparts, bastions and other landforms - most evident today in the amphitheatre at Claremont
Following Capability Brown, a decline of the artificial landform in favour of more natural landscapes, before some signs of revival in mid-twentieth century garden design, like Fletcher Steele's famous Blue Steps at Naumkeag in Massachusetts
The earthworks of the late sixties - Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson et al
Recent gardens influenced by land art, like Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick's Garden of Cosmic Speculation
The article ends by describing the work of Kim Wilkie, who has designed an inverse pyramid for Broughton Park to match the existing mount: 'The earthwork will be named after Orpheus to celebrate its descending form and as a place for music and contemplation... An inverted grass pyramid will descend 7 metres below the level of the restored terraces. Walking around the landscape, the new design will be invisible, but drawing near to the mount, a gentle grass path will spiral down to a square pool of still water deep underground. The water will reflect the sky, a little like an inverted James Turrell occulus.'
This description shows how landforms tend to be conceived in terms of movement - walking around them, climbing up or into them - and as sites from which to contemplate the surrounding environment. As objects themselves they are often best seen from a distance; I have mentioned here before the way that some of the early earthworks were conceived as art viewable from the air. The abstract form of Maiden Castle is often shown through aerial photography, as in the Dorset Shell Guide compiled by Paul Nash, or more recently in Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian (although the Modern Antiquarian website has many other photographs of the castle, along with field reports and folklore).
How does inscape relate to landscape? For Gerard Manley Hopkins, inscape was that which gives something its own special identity. We come to feel and perceive these qualities through what he called instress. J.R. Watson: ‘the inscape of an elm tree is the property by which we recognize it: but it is not just its shape or ‘scape’: it is its ‘inscape’, its inner being or self-hood, the thing itself in its own special nature.’
However, inscape is not necessarily about the qualities of a particular tree. For example, on May 18 1870, Hopkins noted in his diary “great brilliancy and projection: the eye seemed to fall perpendicular from level to level along our trees, the nearer and further Park; all things hitting the sense with double but direct instress.” Here the instress is a force from within the trees which gives this landscape its particular intensity.
W. H. Gardner describes instress as ‘the sensation of inscape – a quasi-mystical illumination, a sudden perception of the deeper pattern, order and unity which gives meaning to external forms.’ Hopkins experienced instress as he walked in the landscape, studying bluebells and horned violets, looking at the moon and the sky or the waves of the sea, even, as here, in encountering an old stone pointed arch:
'The day was bright, the sun sparkling through a frostfog which made the distance dim and the stack of Denbigh hill, as we came near, dead mealy grey against the light: the castle ruins, which crown the hill, were punched out in arches and half arches by bright breaks and eyelets of daylight. We went up to the castle but not in: standing before the gateway I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointed arch...'
- from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ diary, February 4th 1875
There is an interesting Tate Paper by Stephen Daniels on the photographer, antiquarian and promoter of ley lines, Alfred Watkins. It notes a link with the work of land artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, but focuses mainly on Watkins' career and the way photography shaped his archaeological theories.
Watkins was a member of Hereford's Woolhope Club and wrote articles for them 'on various antiquarian subjects, chapels, wayside crosses, city walls and ancient pottery, accompanied on his excursions by the manager of the Meter Works, W.M. McKaig, who assisted with the field work including the photography. Nothing, it seems, prepared members for Watkins’s astonishing contribution to field archaeology, his systematic idea of ley-lines, at the Club’s autumn meeting on 29 September 1921. This was an afternoon excursion and evening lantern slide lecture in the Club’s rooms in Hereford Free Library and Museum, reported the following year in the Club’s transactions as a paper on ‘Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites.' His book, Early British Trackways appeared in 1922 and, following further research and elaboration of his theories, a more substantial book, The Old Straight Track (1925) became a popular success.
Daniels reproduces some of Watkins' illustrations, including the frontispiece to Early British Trackways, showing the alignment of the Four Stones and Castle Tomen. 'This takes the form of a collage, with three photographs of the sites, one a telephoto shot of Castle Tomen, superimposed on a woodland glade marking a ley.' However, neither Watkins' ideas nor the illustrations had a strong impact on contemporary art. Instead painters like Paul Nash and John Piper were more influenced by Antiquity, a journal started in 1927 by O.G.S. Crawford, who considered Watkins a crank and refused to accept an advertisement for his book, The Old Straight Track.
In the Limbourg Brothers’ Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, April (above) is symbolised by a newly betrothed couple standing in a green landscape, with the Duc’s chateau of Dourdan dominating the background. March also features a castle, Lusignan, but the foreground is taken up with agricultural work: sowing and ploughing fields. In contrast April seems to convey the delights of spring - full of pleasure and hope for the future. Two maidens are picking flowers. The trees are in full leaf and new blossoms are visible in the orchard.
The miniatures were painted by the Limbourgs in 1413-16 and completed later by Jean Colombe. There are landscape elements in every month, ranging from February’s scene of winter snow to November’s detailed view of ploughing in fields near the Louvre. However the Hours also include many other illustrations of scenes from the Bible and these too display an interest in landscape: for example a plan of Rome, the Annunciation to the Shepherds in the hills near Bethlehem, and an unusual night scene at Gethsemane. Sadly the Limbourgs were not able to paint the Flight into Egypt, always a stimulating subject for landscape painters, and so it was left to Jean Colombe to execute this particular miniature.
One of the simplest manifestations of landscape and power is the description of a landscape as property. An interesting early example is the description of Owain Glyn Dwr's castle at Sycharth by his court poet Iolo Goch (1320-98), encompassing not only the building but the surrounding landscape. This landscape includes a rabbit warren, deer park, meadows and hayfields, a mill on a "smooth-flowing stream" and a fish pond abounding in "pike and splendid whiting" (see O.H.Creighton's Castles and Landscapes). These features were not only useful, they had aesthetic appeal and symbolised the Prince's authority. The orderly landscape may be an expression of the gentry poet Iolo Goch's conservative outlook (as noted in in this Welsh literature site). Although some of the poet's description may be idealised, there is some archaeological evidence of the mill and the fishponds (a relevant BBC news report is here).
O. H. Creighton's Castles and Landscapes notes that the study of medieval ornamental landscapes is "still in its infancy", with numerous difficulties in interpreting sites that have been altered extensively over time. However, progress has been made at several locations, for example in understanding the extent to which the grounds of Bodiam castle in Sussex (illustrated with my photographs here) could have been designed for aesthetic effect. The castle is at the centre of a series of small lakes which give the approaching visitor a sequence of imposing views. It may be that the 'Gun Garden' on a 300m high ridge was used as a viewpoint. The castle, licensed in 1385, was later abandoned as a principle residence and thus has retained its general layout. It is now sometimes seen as the ideal of a picturesque castle.
The evidence at Bodiam and at the castles of Kenilworth (with extensive waterworks), Hereford (with a detached water garden) and Ravensworth (with diverse evidence of landscaping) suggest a medieval attitude to landscape that is more often associated with the eighteenth century aristocracy. Creighton concludes by posing three questions for future research. First, how far back in time were castles associated with landscapes designed for pleasure? Second, to what extent would aesthetic considerations have helped determine the siting of a castle? And finally, how widespread was the phenomenon?
Walter Benjamin writes of Heidelberg Castle in One Way Street: “Ruins jutting into the sky can appear doubly beautiful on clear days when, in their windows or above their contours, the gaze meets passing clouds. Through the transient spectacle it opens in the sky, destruction reaffirms the eternity of these fallen stones.”
One might compare the effect of the statues of the apostles, lining the façade of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. As I remember it, the vast blue sky renders them life-like, stepping out of time, with nothing to connect them to the modern city beneath. In contrast the ruined walls of Heidelberg and the passing clouds seen by Benjamin signal the presence of time, slow and fleeting.
Stone and sky: both statues and ruins are temporary transformations of stone, but the sky itself, ever-changing, represents the fullness of time.
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