The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice

François-Auguste Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841 

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been uploaded to YouTube (I can see myself in the audience!) The documentary turns on an epiphany she had at Grindelwald Glacier, while holidaying in Switzerland in 1949. Tilda Swinton reads the quote about her 'terrifying desire' to roll down the mountain that I included in a post about Barns-Graham I wrote here six years ago. I've always thought of her glacier paintings as a facet of modernist landscape painting but perhaps I shouldn't really be talking about her at all on this blog, because as Cousins points out she wasn't looking up at the Alpine landscape, she was looking down at the ice. Numerous paintings and drawing examine the structure, light and translucent colours of the glacier and a new book edited by Rob Airey has just been published dedicated to these. The variations she found over the years are shown in one of the highlights of the film, a long sequence that just just puts these glacier pictures on screen one after the other in an old fashioned slide show, accompanied by Linda Buckley's music.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival this year and I would love to have asked Mark Cousins about it, because earlier this year we visited this extraordinary old spa town on holiday. But we were actually there on a Grand Budapest Hotel pilgrimage and I'm sure he would have had no interest in talking about award ceremonies and a place that has nothing to do with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham! Another place he didn't talk much about was St. Ives and the art colony she's always been associated with - as he says in a BFI interview, this is limiting for a painter who saw herself as an independent 'lone wolf'. Cousins thinks there are three particular reasons why 21st century audiences may be interested in her art: climate change (so evident at Grindelwald), the contemporary focus on relatively neglected female figures and her neurodiversity. This last aspect is really his central theme - A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a portrait of the artist's 'brain'. It includes some beautifully shot footage of her obsessively compiled notebooks, where she explored the mathematics of colour combinations. All in all I think it's an excellent film that sidesteps the familiar approaches of an arts documentary. Peter Bradshaw gave it a four star review in The Guardian yesterday. His article starts with a photograph of Barns-Graham out sketching in the landscape, so maybe it's not too inappropriate to talk about her again here. 

From the official trailer for A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head

Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023

We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Rising Tides', which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard and Antarctica with art made around the retreating chalk cliffs of East Sussex. Having studied the Seven Sisters a few years ago, I was taken aback to see how they have changed recently, with so much undercutting now that it looks like caves are forming in them, although of course the chalk will topple before that happens. Below you can see me posing in front of a rock fall sculpture in the gallery. Stibbon assembled old postcards to chart changes to the cliffs and re-sketched a view drawn in the nineteenth century by Elizabeth Smith Paget, allowing us to compare and contrast. She did something similar a few years ago at Chamonix, where Turner had painted the glacier and Ruskin (with Frederick Crawley) had produced a striking daguerreotype. While her predecessors 'observed the drama of a sea of ice almost at the level they stood, Stibbon looked down into an exposed deep valley with “a dark moraine-covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice.”' (Observer review)  

The drawing above, Cliff Crevice, was done in part with chalk found on the beach at Eastbourne. I always like the idea of some small element of the landscape directly entering the artwork. Here, in an interview for Studio International, she describes two more examples:

On the subject of mediums, I have also used seawater. There’s a big sea drawing, Breaker, done in Indian ink. Oddly, I haven’t tried using seawater before, and the pigments dispersed quite strangely, organising themselves into some other form. One of the galleries features a series of drawings of the sea which I made on the deck of a wooden boat, while we passed from the north of Norway to Svalbard, which took three days and was very rough. I made drawings not intended as a work to exhibit, but it became apparent the further north we got that the ice in the ink was taking over. I had 20 or so drawings, and when I laid them out, you could see that progression: it starts out as normal drawings, and then you can see the crystals formed in the ink. I like that as a document of weather taking over the drawing.

I'll end here with a photo of one of those ink sketches, in which you can clearly see the crystals.

Troubled Waters

This cool poster gives a strong impression of 'Troubled Waters', an alternative title for Mauritz Stiller's Johan.  The film was an adaptation of Juhani Aho's Finnish novel, published a decade earlier in 1911.  Landscape initiates the story, as a group of men arrive to dig out a canal in the countryside and, in a memorable sequence, people watch from the riverbank as water floods through the new channel.  One of the workers, the film's anti-hero (or villain, depending on how you see it) rows up to the new waterway and surfs down it in his small boat.  Time passes and one day he returns and seduces Marit, the film's heroine, taking her away in his boat over the wild rapids.  Given how skilfully this white water rafting is carried out, I find it amazing that it was the actor Urho Somersalmi who took the boat over the Kamlunge rapids.  Jenny Hasselqvist, who played Marit, was apparently the first woman to make this journey and at one point during the shoot she saved Somersalmi when he was washed overboard.    

D. W. Griffith's Way Down East was released six months before Johan and it too contains a famous river sequence.  Whereas the rapids in Johan feel central to the story, symbolising the attraction and dangers of the seductive stranger, the landscape in Way Down East is really only present at the end of the film, heightening its emotional climax, as Lilian Gish runs despairingly out into a blizzard and then finds herself trapped on the frozen river as its ice breaks up around her.  Again, there were no stunt doubles: it was Gish who lay on the ice while Richard Barthelmess jumped over the cracks to rescue her.  Gish wrote about the experience in her autobiography: 

"The scenes on and around the ice were filmed at White River Junction, Vermont, where the White River and the Connecticut flowed side by side. The ice was thick; it had to be either sawed or dynamited, so that there would be floes for each day's filming. The temperature never rose above zero during the three weeks we worked there. ... I suggested that my hand and my hair trail in the water as I lay on the floe that was drifting toward the falls. Mr. Griffith was delighted with the effect. After a while, my hair froze, and I felt as if my hand were in a flame. To this day, it aches if I am out in the cold for very long."

Bare plain, leafless, treeless

Reading the exiled Ovid's Tristia and Black Sea Letters you keep wanting him to tell his correspondents back in Rome about the landscape at Tomis.  But all of these poems are about one thing - his desire to get back home - and so his brief descriptions do not go into any details, they are a means of provoking sympathy in the reader. Here is what translator Peter Green says about Ovid's account of the region where Tomis was situated, on the tip of a peninsula, seventy miles south of the Danube delta. 

'Its treeless, monotonous steppe, he writes, resembles a frozen grey sea, patched - appropriately enough - with wormwood, a maquis of bitter and symbolic associations.  There are no vines, he repeatedly complains, no orchards: spring in the Italian sense doesn't exist and few birds sing.  The countryside is ugly, harsh, savage, inhuman.  The water is brackish, and merely exacerbates thirst.  But Ovid's two great fearful obsessions are the biting cold and the constant barbarian raids. Again and again he returns to the snow, the ice, the sub-zero temperatures: bullock-carts creaking across the frozen Danube, wine broken off and sold in chunks, the violent glacial north-easter (today known as the crivat) that rips off roof-tiles, sears the skin, and even blows down buildings if they are not solidly constructed.' 

Was he exaggerating? In the tenth Black Sea Letter Ovid actually gave some scientific proof that the Black Sea did actually freeze at Tomis.  In this area many freshwater rivers flow into the sea and there is a cold north wind that chills the air.  As Peter Green says in one of his endnotes (which are wonderfully witty and erudite): 'Dr. Stefan Stoenescu informs me that 'the rich salty waters [of the Danube delta] create a brackish region ear the littoral which allows an inversion of temperature to take place.  The unsalty waters of the Danube have sufficient power to maintain a thin layer of comparatively sweet fresh water above the deeply settled salty Mediterranean current.  As a result, near the Danube delta shores freezing is not an unusual occurrence.  Ovid was right.''

Eugène Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1862

Nevertheless, Ovid does not really say what Tomis was like outside winter.  Now called Constanța, it is a tourist destination and has 'a humid subtropical climate' with cool breezes in summer and warm autumns.  The treelessness Ovid complained about was true of his immediate location but if he had ventured further afield he would have encountered forests.  Presumably the dangers from the local tribesmen, with their poison-tipped arrows, prevented him leaving the town.  So this wasn't a poetic exile like some others that I have written about here - Xie Lingyun, for example, banished in 422 to the southeast coast of China, but able to draw solace from his walks in the mountains.  Ovid was trapped and desperate to leave.

I will end here with a few lines of Ovid's poetry, from Tristia Book III, written de profundis in his frozen hell.  The north wind screams and 'no comber will surge up from the hard packed flood' and Ovid sadly recalls those early autumn days when everything in Italy is ripening. 

... No sweet grapes here beneath thick shady vine-leaves,
   no frothing must to top up the deep vats;
no orchards, no fruit trees, no apple on which Acontius
   could cut the message for his love to read:
nothing to meet the eye here but bare plain, leafless, treeless -
   not the habitat any luckier man would choose -
and this, with the whole wide world's expanse to choose from,
   is the region selected for my punishment!

Black ice

Sólheimajökull glacier, Iceland

Photographed by me in May 2019

After returning from Iceland recently I was keen to write something about its landscape but realised I had already covered a lot of the ground here previously - see for example 'An eagle, a mountain, a ship' and 'To Place: Verne's Journey'.  The photograph above was taken at a rapidly retreating glacier, beautifully sculpted by melting water and blackened by the underlying volcanic rock.  My excuse for including it here is a bit tenuous - it's that I was reading in Robert Macfarlane's new book Underland about glacier ice.  In Greenland he encounters a very different kind of black ice, dark from the compression of millenia, emerging 'from so deep down in time that it has lost all colour.'  As Colin Thubron writes in his review, this sight 'induces a kind of nausea.'

'The first block has fallen from the glacier’s face before he and his companions turn to look, and then an enormous white train seems to be driving out of its wall before plunging into the water, and it pulls white wagons after it, followed by the semblance of a cathedral and a whole fracturing city. ... Then, he adds, something terrible happens. A submerged, black pyramid of ancient, compacted ice rears up from the water as high as the glacier itself, a shape as hard as meteorite, and he and the others are dancing and shouting, “appalled and thrilled to have seen this repulsive, exquisite thing rise up that should never have surfaced.”'

An object like this can perhaps only be conveyed effectively in words.  Googling for images of black icebergs, I learned that a few years ago one particular photograph went viral - someone described it as 'goth as fuck' - and there was an article about it on the Smithsonian website.  Apparently 'flipped' icebergs, with the older parts on top, may become more common.  Glaciers no longer stretch into the cold seas but break apart at the edge of the land, "so you get these really thin pieces of ice that flip over right when they’ve broken off."  Nonetheless, this black iceberg was extremely rare, and the photographer considered himself incredibly lucky: "it’s like if you see a double rainbow over a whale breaching".  You can imagine Rob Macfarlane feeling equally lucky that the landscape had delivered up such a perfect metaphor for him.

Blue iceberg, Greenland

Photo: Wikimedia Commons - claire rowland

When I got back from Iceland, several people at work asked if I had gone 'to see the northern lights'.  It brought home to me what a bucket-list tourist phenomenon this has become.  No, we had not, and I suspect that if I did organise such a trip it would only be disappointing.  One of my colleagues went recently, to Norway I think he said, and said it had been cloudy until the last night, when they finally experienced the sky flickering, but witnessed none of the green light you see on photographs.  In Greenland, Rob and his companions first experience the Northern Lights as 'a scarf of radar-green' with the mountains shooting 'jade searchlights into space.'  On another night it appears as 'green fog-banks, rolling, coalescing, ebbing.'  And finally, at the end of the trip, they see a display that is 'profuse, extravagant, spinning over thousands of miles of sky.'  The stars seem to shine more brightly through the aurora. It seems paradoxical - 'none of us can explain how the green light could be collaborative rather than competitive with the starlight.'

Collaboration is a key theme in Underland and one of the reasons why companionship is important on the trips it describes.  Rob is accompanied to Greenland by Helen Mort, 'a rock climber, a runner and a writer of rare abilities', and Bill Carslake, a composer who is able to hear notes in the sound of wind on the glacier ("it's the harmonic series of D!")  Nick Papadmitriou has complained that everyone encountered in Underland is 'imbued with a wisdom and roundness of character that marks them out as irritatingly exceptional human beings', but this is not a conventional travel book and there isn't space to develop proper portraits of people.  As a reader, part of the pleasure is trying to imagine travelling with Rob and his companions, coping with the exhausting ice peaks and crevasses, negotiating a dangerous scree slope and a narrow snow bridge, not to mention keeping pace conversationally with three erudite Cambridge graduates (a kind of intellectual Sublime).  I know I would not have made it far (I've an image of myself stuck on the glacier, driven mad with fear and exhaustion, like Leni Riefenstahl's husband in The White Hell of Pitz Palu, who has to be tied up for his own safety).  Fortunately, our holiday in Iceland presented no such hazards.  There were also many memorable sights in addition to the black and white Sólheimajökull glacier.  Nevertheless, I would love to have been on that beach in Greenland to witness the appearance of that extraordinary iceberg...

Twenty minutes after falling into the sea, it settles in the water.  Gulls land 'on this new territory in their dozens, shake out their wings, tuck one leg up into their breast feathers for warmth, hunker down.'  The next day Rob finds a small chunk of it, washed up on the shoreline and, with difficulty, lifts the dark ice and carries it back to the tents.

'The sun shines through it.  Air bubbles inside it show as silver: wormholes, right-angle bends, incredible zigzags and sharp layers.
That night an arctic fox comes to our camp, a playful blue shadow.
The little berg takes two days to melt.  It leaves a stain on the rock that won't vanish.'

Wovenland

I thought it was time to bring back my regular surveys of 'landscape music', having had a couple of years off.  The last one I did was in 2015 - it contains links to the earlier ones, or you can just check back through my old December posts.  I should apologise for some dead links in my previous surveys, as videos and tracks have been moved or taken down over the years.  Looking back I see there's now a missing video in a post I wrote back in 2010 about Toshiya Tsunoda, the Japanese sound artist.  He's the first of my picks for 2018, with the album Wovenland, a collaboration with Taku Unami (the title refers to the way their separate field recordings are woven together).  Reviewing it in Wire Magazine, Derek Walmsley thought this 'one of the most original and startling recording projects in recent years.'



One of the albums I missed by not doing this in 2016 was 3hattrio's Solitaire, inspired by Edward Abbey’s nature writing classic, Desert Solitaire (1968).  Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, based this, his first non-fiction book, on the time he spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument.  3hattrio say they play 'American desert music':

'Their aim is to create a new music which responds to the natural world of their sacred homeland near Zion National Park in Utah.  They also strive to acknowledge the cultural traditions of generations of people who have worked and lived on the deserts of the American southwest. The subject matter of the songs is often desert oriented, sometimes not. Mostly, they express the desert experientially from a daily-ness of watching light off distant mesas and hearing the way sound plays off sheer sandstone cliffs. Then they play music. They don’t over-think it.' 

Their new release is Lord Of The Desert and includes tracks called 'Night Sky', 'Skeleton Tree' and 'Dust Devil' (see video clip below).

My earlier round-ups always featured music from Touch and their most recent release is relevant - Howlround's The Debatable Lands.  This was inspired by the border region in Cumbria which Graham Robb wrote about in his latest book (quite interesting, but not as rewarding a read as I was expecting).  Another liminal space was the source for Jana Winderen's Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone, originally a sound installation for the 2017 Sonic Acts Festival:

'The marginal ice zone is the dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice, which is ecologically extremely vulnerable. The phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the oxygen on the planet. During spring, this zone is the most important CO2 sink in our biosphere. In Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone the sounds of the living creatures become a voice in the current political debate concerning the official definition of the location of the ice edge.' 

I'm listening to the album now as I write this, streaming from Jana Winderen's bandcamp page.

In my round-up for 2012 I featured Erland Cooper's Orkney Symphony.  In March this year he released Solan Goose, its tracks named after the Orcadian words for seabirds (the solan goose is a northern gannet).  He also released Murmeration, with a Norman Ackroyd picture on the cover (incidentally, Ackroyd's daughter Poppy is a Brighton-based composer, whose work sometimes references landscape themes and uses field recordings).  Erland Cooper is planning a third record in this vein, as he explained in an interview for The Island Review, which will explore 'our relationship and respect for the sea: how it surrounds the community and the landscape; how it supports the greatest ecosystem of all.'  Together these albums are inspired by the words of the poet George Mackay Brown. “The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light.”

Stuart Hyatt's Metaphonics: The Complete Field Works Recordings comprises 7 LPs and a book, based around his own field recordings but incorporating collaborations from around forty other artists.  The YouTube clip below presents a track from the album Pogue's Run - 'from its source, through the city, into a mysterious three-mile underground tunnel, and finally to the White River, Pogue’s Run represents the ongoing tension between nature and civilization.'  I enjoyed seeing field recordists filmed as if they were in a pop video, although as this goes on and they reach the underground river, it more closely resembles scenes a scene from a science fiction film.  There is an interview with Hyatt at the online art/science magazine CLOT.  He quotes from an essay by Yiorgis Sakellariou in the Metaphonics book, which views field recording as "an alchemical practice, a transformation of perception of both recordist and environment. A recording location is not simply a geographically framed scenery, but more importantly, a place of inquiry, experimentation, and wonder."

I will stick there at five main recommendations, but here, briefly, are a few other albums from 2018 that reflect landscape in different ways.  Further suggestions in the comments below would be welcome.

• Grouper's Grid of Points, written by Liz Harris during a residency in Ucross, Wyoming. One of its tracks is inspired by Zabriskie Point, a film I wrote about here in May.
• Richard Skelton's Front Variations subjected sine waves 'to increasing amounts of feedback in order to simulate the so-called ice-albedo feedback mechanism. This is the process whereby the action of melting glaciers reduces the global surface area of ice, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that glaciers reflect, which in turn increases global temperatures and causes further glacial melting.'
• Laurie Anderson's Landfall is a cycle of songs about Hurricane Sandy - a recording was released this year with the Kronos Quartet.  Tracks include 'Wind Whistles Through the Dark City,' 'The Water Rises' and 'Our Street is a Black River'...  
• Daniel Bachman's guitar in The Morning Star is set against a background of field recordings.  It continues a sequence of 'Songs for the Setting Sun' that he began on the 2015 album River (which was featured on my 2015 round-up). 
• Jim Ghedi's A Hymn For Ancient Land, was a bit too pastoral for the Quietus reviewer: 'only on ‘Phoenix Works’, a song dealing with the decline of traditional industries in the north, does he explicitly deal with darkness. This, coupled with the dense, meandering tonalities of ‘Fortingall Yew’, saves the album from being a landscape painting.' 
• According to The Quietus, the album of the year was Gazelle Twin's Pastoral, which 'picks away at the bucolic, Constable-generated image of English countryside like a fetid scab.' Gazelle Twin is Brighton-based electonic musician  Elizabeth Bernholz, whose previous project was based on J. G. Ballard's last novel Kingdom Come. 

Finally, I will conclude here not with an album, but with an app.  Numero Group's 'Environments collects the entire historic record series by master sound engineer Irv Teibel into one easy to use package for the iPhone and iPad' (it costs £2.99).  If you're not familiar with Irv Teibel's 1970s psychoacoustic nature recordings, there's a good article about him at Pitchfork.  Aquarium Drunkard described the new app as 'an ingenious re-contextualization of this retro-futurist “gebrauchtsmusik” that recapitulates the series’ initial novelty. However captivating Teibel’s tale, the Environments app now illuminates an anthropocene landscape where 'Dusk in the Okefenokee Swamp' and a 'Summer Cornfield' are mediated by an inescapable layer of sleek, fabricated hardware and playfully nostalgic software.'

Soundless hang mountain waterfalls, rainbows of jade

I have been reading J. D. Frodsham's translations, The Collected Poems of Li He, recently reissued by Calligrams.  If you are not familiar with Li He (790-816), here's how he's described in the blurb:

Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according to a later commentator, “sexual dissipation,” or both. An obscure and unsuccessful relative of the imperial family, he would set out at dawn on horseback, pause, write a poem, and toss the paper away. A servant boy followed him to collect these scraps in a tapestry bag.

The book is wonderfully well-furnished with notes and an extensive introduction.  There is a short analysis of Li He's use of colour, similar to what I wrote about recently in relation to Georg Trakl (1887-1914).  Despite living 1,100 years and over 7000 km apart, Li He and Trakl had a lot in common.  I mentioned Trakl's use of black - 'black decay, black snow, black wind, black waters, black silence'.  For Li He, there was white, which in China is associated with mourning and misfortune.  'Even in the West, psychologists tend to associate a strong liking for white with psychic abnormality ... He's landscapes, drenched in this white radiance, shine with an unearthly pallor.' 

Li He in Wanxiaotang Zhuzhuang Huazhuan (1743)

Frodsham writes that Li He 'was haunted by the mystery of whiteness as another great, poet, Lorca, was haunted by the spell of green.'  This is a reference to Lorca's 'Romance Sonambulo' which begins 'Verde que te quiero verde', 'Green, how I want you green.'  Start looking for doomed poets who were obsessed with colour and you will quickly encounter other cases.  Dylan Thomas, for example, uses green 46 times in his poetry, black 39 and white 37.  This information comes from a 1972 article comparing Thomas and Lorca's use of green.  'Fern Hill' is the Thomas poem most infused with the colour green, where it means youth, innocence, and the hills and fields around a Carmarthenshire farmhouse where the poet went to stay as a boy.  

An analysis by Eliot Slater revealed that Shelley and Keats were 'relatively abundent' in their use of colour.  However, 'Shelley uses for the greater part straightforward and commonplace words: yellow, blue, snowy, purple, green, grey, white, black, golden, hoary, dun, azure, etc., and very rarely such exotic terms as "moonlight‑coloured". Keats is much freer with such words, and phrases as vermeil, damask, verdurous, Tyrian, rubious‑argent, ruddy gules, volcanian yellow, etc.'  Shelley favoured blue and green, Keats used white more than any other colour.

Which brings us back to Li He... J. D. Frodsham provides a table showing that white (bai), ecru (su) and jade-white (yu) appear 172 times in Li He's poetry.  After that, comes gold or metal (jin, 73), red (hong, 69), blue-green (ching, 68), emerald (lu, 48), yellow (huang, 45), sapphire (bi, 26) and purple (zi, 25).  Frodsham lists of some of the 'white' lines in Li's verse (which is what I did for Trakl, only with blue). For example,  

The entire mountain bathed in a white dawn. 

A white sky, water like raw silk.

Jade mist on green water / like pennants of white.

And, as Frodsham writes, it is against this pallid background that 'the other colours burn with a brilliant flame...'

A thousand hills of darkest emerald

Smoky yellow mantles the willows 

Twilight purple freezes in the dappled sky

I will end here with a longer quote, as these isolated lines cannot do Li He's poems (and Frodsham's translations) justice at all.  I think it should be alright to include one whole short poem here, 'Cold up North', which describes ice on the Yellow River (a subject I once wrote a whole post about here).  The poem is unusually straightforward for Li He, and requires no particular explanation.  In its colours, it moves from the darkness of a winter sky to the jade white of frozen waterfalls.

One quarter lours black while three turn purple,
Ice vaults the Yellow River, fish and dragons die.
Tree-bark three feet thick splits against the grain,
Chariots of a ton or more travel on the river.

Frost-flowers on the grass, big as silver-coins,
No brandished blade could penetrate the sombre sky.
Swirling in a raging sea the flying ice-floes roar,
Soundless hang mountain waterfalls, rainbows of jade.

End of the Glacier

We enjoyed a family day trip to Hastings at the weekend, where I am pleased to say I was victorious at crazy golf.  As a child I always imagined designing my own courses and on the way round I was daydreaming about one based on the great works of land art, where golf balls have to be putted through models of Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Michael Heizer's Double Negative, round the Spiral Jetty, through the Lightning Field and into Roden Crater... 

I was thinking about art because we had just been to the Jerwood Gallery, which is currently showing exhibitions by Mark Wallinger and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The Wallinger includes Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (2007), which refers back to the great painting by Bruegel but is just a video installation with You've Been Framed clips. He also had some photographs of the local Birdman competition and a room with a wall of mirrors and an Eadward Muybridge grid, with encouragement to take photographs (my sons were happy to oblige). Here, I will focus on Barns-Graham, who I've only ever mentioned once before on this blog.

The Jerwood's display, Sea, Rock, Earth and Ice, is described on The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust website.

'The Jerwood Gallery takes their own Barns-Graham painting Winter Landscape, 1952 as the rationale for the display. The starting point is a strong group of glaciers that includes Glacier Painting, Green and Brown, 1951 from Sheffield Museums (the show travels to the Graves Gallery, opening 8 December) before showing how the series developed away from having direct glacier references to one of rock forms...'

The sketchbooks and texts displayed alongside the paintings show the artist trying to uncover the shapes of the mountains' steep rock faces and curving ice fields.  I noted down part of a quote, next to End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald (1949), which conveys a strong sense of the Sublime.

"Once while working against the evening light rapidly fading, I experienced a terrifying desire to roll myself down the mountain side.  Calmly as I could I came down the wood steps cut in the ice, Grindelwald far below. ... I heard the awful roar of an avalanche and seeing what looked like a trickle of salt in the distant heights.  All this and the many moods beautiful and frightening fascinated me."

I have always loved Barns-Graham's glacier paintings, in particular Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald (1950) - not in this show, but reproduced (above) on the front of the Tate's 2005 exhibition catalogue.  Maybe this is partly because they resemble frozen air.  The Grindelwald glacier, she wrote, seemed to breath. "This likeness to glass and transparency, combined with solid, rough ridges made me wish to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through, and all round, as a bird flies, a total experience..."

Sea, Rock, Earth and Ice took in other work from Barns-Graham's long career, and was a reminder of the abiding interest she showed in other naturally abstract landforms, from the quarries she sketched in the late fifties to the lava she drew in the early nineties.  The waves of the Lanzarote lava field were conveyed in white chalk and pastel on black paper, reminding me of the Tacita Dean drawings I saw recently in London. The fact that for a decade or so these artists were contemporaries is rather amazing.  When Barns-Graham died in 2004 at the age of 91, her 'radiant' late work was evidently as highly regarded by critics as anything else she had painted.

Farther hills as hills again like these

Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565

Source Wikimedia Commons

To follow up my previous post, drawing on Joseph Leo Koerner's Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016), and also to provide some mental respite from this oppressive heat, I thought I would write here today about Breugel's The Hunters in the Snow.  It is a painting I have mentioned here before, in the context of poetry about landscape art ('Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green / Wall in the wild, cold scene below...' - Walter De La Mare).  It is also a painting loved by Tarkovsky fans as it features in both Mirror and Solaris.  Koerner discusses it in his final chapter, 'Nature', along with Bruegel's other paintings of The Seasons of the Year.  In a rare personal aside, Koerner says that he had a poster of The Hunters in the Snow on his wall right through his college and graduate school years.  Then, despite having a flat in Heidelberg with an 'expansive view of the Neckar Valley' through his window, he was happier losing himself in the depths of Bruegel's painting. 

Koerner imagines the viewer of this painting beginning by focusing on the pack of dogs, before being drawn towards 'one of the deepest depths in European art.'  And yet, 'the paw prints in the snow and the gigantic cliffs are part of the same continuum. Bruegel structures his painting to make our launch into space unavoidable.'  The distances made visible here recall contemporary Flemish atlases. Landscape features like trees and houses are shown in elevation but roads, rivers and valleys are depicted as if in elevation, offering us routes to be followed.  Bruegel reconciles near and far.  As he paints mountains and seas suggesting 'territories yet to be discovered, he pictures them as lifeworlds like our own, those farther hills as hills again like these.'

In the far distance (see above), a procession of figures can be discerned walking towards the horizon over the ice from a harbour town.  The winter before Breugel painted this view, the Scheldt at Antwerp had frozen over.  This flattening of the landscape into a single medium, ice, has effectively 'turned the world into a Borgesian one-to-one map of itself.'  The whiteness of the snow links different parts of the composition, from the hunters marching into the painting to the distant figures heading out of view.  It also dazzles the eye with an overabundance of light.  The roofscape of the mill, covered in snow, is hard to work out at first.  Here, 'Bruegel reverses the elucidating effects that snow has at a distance.'  Thick icicles hang from the buildings. It is a cold village to which the hunters return.  Everyone seems to turn away from us in this picture, 'as nature itself does in winter.  ... Through the mere resources of white paint, Bruegel shows home and the human from the indifferent perspective of the world.'

Battle on the Ice

 
In the sections on landscape and music in my book Frozen Air,  I wrote about the difficulty of translating the physical forms of cliffs into music.  However, in Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev did try to do just this, as can be seen in this extract from a diagram in Eisenstein's Film Sense (1948).  The full fold-out page showed the 'dawn of anxious waiting' sequence preceding the famous battle on the ice, with stills from the film, musical notation, diagrams of the film's visuals and a representation in lines of the way sound and image move forward. In this frame, the cliff shape is mirrored by the score's descending arpeggio of G#.  I have embedded a clip of this sequence from the rather crackly original film above so you can see how this worked.  In the version of the film re-released in 1995 with a newly recorded score, this descending 'cliff' phrase is less obvious and actually comes in the subsequent shot.

Does this sonic correspondence really help us imagine the steepness of the cliff?  The idea was criticised by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno.  As Peter Vergo writes in his book The Music of Painting (2010), they 'justifiably derided the idea that it is possible to depict a cliff musically'.  Eisenstein's diagram shows a congruence between cliff form and the visual appearance of a score, but what we actually hear when listening to music does not necessarily correspond to the way musical notation appears on the page. 

I have been trying to recall when I saw Alexander Nevsky with a live orchestra - at the Royal Festival Hall sometime in the nineties I think?  I may just be misremembering watching the re-released version of the film when it arrived in London.  Watching this scene now I am struck by those beautiful Sugimoto-style shots of the ice field.  The first of these, which comes after some close-ups of the soldiers, can also be seen in the Film Sense diagram, matched to a flat musical vista.  Some notes for the Criterion Collection release of the film describe how the visual effects for the Battle of the Ice were achieved.

'Nevsky’s extraordinary set piece was filmed first—during a blazing hot summer—in the countryside outside Moscow. Cinematographer Eduard Tissé used a filter to suggest winter light; trees were painted light blue and dusted with chalk; an artificial horizon was created out of sand. The ice itself was a mixture of asphalt and melted glass. In a remarkable engineering feat, sheets of this fake ice were supported by floating pontoons to be deflated on cue so that it would shatter under the weight of the Teutonic knights according to pre-cut patterns.'

I'll conclude here with another YouTube clip, this time just Prokofiev's music and score, from a 1966 recording by the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra.

Body of Ice

In 2011, Australian harpist Alice Giles got the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of her geologist grandfather Cecil Madigan, who has been a member of Mawson's First Australasian Antarctic Expedition a century earlier.  At Davis Station she left her instrument by the shore as an aeolian harp, as you can see in the clip from her website embedded above. "The sound of the wind through the strings was incredibly clear and concentrated,'' she told the Sydney Morning Herald.  On her return she composed Alice in Antarctica, mixing music and extracts from Madigan's expedition diary.  She also participated in a conference about the Antarctic and music, the papers for which can be read (open access) in  Antarctica — Music, Sounds and Cultural Connections (Australian National University Press, 2015).  Here are some other things covered in this book that seemed worth noting on this blog.

Gilbert Kerr playing bagpipes to an indifferent penguin
on the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition

Unknown photographer. Source: Royal Scottish Geographical Society

• Music made by explorers and scientists.  Various kinds of instruments and music making equipment were taken on the polar voyages, from hand organs on Franklin's expedition to the pianola used by Scott. One of the book's essays concerns a well-known photograph of Gilbert Kerr and his bagpipes (above) - the pipes themselves were later taken to the war and lost during the Battle of the Somme.  A piano on the Morning, a relief ship sent to Scott's first expedition in 1902, was used to compose what is probably the first published music written on an Antarctic polar journey.  Gerald S. Doorly wrote a small collection of songs, including 'Ice King', written as they searched the coastline looking for Scott's ship Discovery.  Most intriguing for me though is the idea that a Japanese flute may have been played over the ice on the Shirase Antarctic Expedition (1910-12).  Research by Rupert Summerson, himself a Shakuhachi player, polar explorer and scholar (a pretty cool job description), suggests that the player would have been Keiichi Tada, who also wrote tanka inspired by his journey to the Antarctic:

Looking back
Looking back again
Looking back
All I’ll see are mountains

And mountains of snow (trans. Amelia Fielden)

• Compositions inspired by the Antarctic. The earliest example of a composition based on experience of the continent may be James Dwight Dana's musical setting of lines from Thulia: a Tale of the Antarctic, a narrative poem written by James Croxall Palmer, who was assistant surgeon to the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42.  Dana was an eminent geologist and part of the same expedition, though not on the ship that sailed down to the edge of Antarctica. Of course there are numerous more recent examples of music directly inspired by encounters with the Antarctic - I have mentioned here before the work of Peter Maxwell Davies for example.  An essay in the book by Patrick Shepherd refers to his own experience and that of three other New Zealand composers who have been to Antarctica: Chris Cree Brown, Gareth Farr, and Phil Dadson, who experienced a kind of epiphany while out on the ice:

'I was recording ice cracks for one entire night (without too much luck I have to say) and during this time sat motionless, simply watching and listening, much of the time focused on my relationship with the planet and to the sun. Instead of watching the sun slowly creeping along the horizon line, I could literally sense the earth turning around the sun. It was a simple and profound sensation and it has stayed with me.'

• Sound art made on the continent.  Pure field recording may be rarer now than it was when Douglas Quin made Antarctica twenty years ago.  Instead it tends to be a component of projects that combine different kinds of sound or used it to accompany other media.  Philip Samartzis provided field recordings for Body of Ice, a dance piece by Christina Evans, who contributes an essay to the book describing how she worked with her dancers to imitate the movements of ice - rolling, crumbling, melting and freezing.  When Cheryl E. Leonard visited the Antarctic she collected material to make natural instruments: limpet shells, the bones of adelie penguins, igneous rock slabs forming a scale of tones and glossy rock shards that chimed like glass.  She is now able to play these instruments to the accompaniment of her own field recordings, of seals, meltwater and the Antarctic ice, cracking and drifting in the sea. 

 

Hoar Frost

 Camille Pissarro, Landscape, St. Thomas, 1856

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was reading in the news the other day about a forthcoming Tate exhibition, Impressionists in London, French artists in exile (1870-1904), which will include two views of Kew by Camille Pissarro that have never been shown in the UK before.  I'm sure it'll be interesting, but I'd have been much more curious to see an exhibition that has just finished at Ordrupgaard in Denmark: Pissarro. A Meeting on St. Thomas.  This 'meeting' was with the Danish Golden Age painter Fritz Melbye, who arrived seeking inspiration on St Thomas - now one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, then part of the Danish West Indies - around 1850.  The young Pissarro had been sent away to school in France but was back working for his father whilst aspiring to become an artist.  The two of them became friends and in 1853 they headed off to Venezuela, where they would spend two years sharing a studio before parting company - Pissarro for France and the birth of Impressionism, Melbye for further adventures in the Caribbean and Far East.  

Pissarro is also the subject of an excellent New York Review of Books article by Julian Bell which discusses two more exhibitions dedicated to his work in Paris.  It begins with one of the paintings that appeared in the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, Gelée blanche.  This is now in the Musée d'Orsay, who quote the most scornful response from a contemporary reviewer, Louis Leroy: 'those are sheer scratches of paint uniformly put on a dirty canvas. It has neither head or tail, neither top or bottom, neither front or back.''  It is hard to imagine any treatment of this humble motif that would have pleased such critics, but Pissarro's winter earth, painted without earth colours, must have seemed particularly off putting.  You can't simply enter into this landscape, letting the eye be led into the distance.  Hoar Frost is a world away from Pissarro's carefully composed view of St Thomas.  Its rough paint surface is hard going, like the frosty ground beneath the peasant's feet.

Camille Pissarro, Hoar Frost, 1873

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The whole of Julian Bell's article on Pissarro is well worth reading, but here is how he explains the particular magic of Hoar Frost.  

'Oil painting can turn shadows from nothings into palpable somethings: slabs of rich color. The gently rising Île-de-France farmland depicted in Hoar Frost (Gelée blanche à Ennery) becomes an intricate weaving of russets, blue-greens, umbers, and pale yellows as morning sun shines on it from behind a row of poplars. As you approach the canvas, the bristles that have scuffed it with stiff, clotted brushloads seem to rasp your skin, and you are jolted into a poetry of chill January: a poetry sustained by close plein air observation and resolved with a scrupulous completeness.

'At the same time, you may perhaps register the oddness of the operation. Those long stripes of shadow criss-crossing the ruts and country road are cast by no visible object. The colors of what’s sunlit and the colors of what isn’t meet in stout equivalence on the canvas, but for anyone on the scene—say that trudging peasant with his load of sticks—the former would have priority. We expect grass to be green more than we expect it to be blue. In effect, the shadows spook the comfortable farmland, nagging us with the consideration that a further unseen presence stands beneath the poplars, that of the observing artist.'

Terra Incognita

Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita was published twenty-one years ago, before the hundredth anniversaries of the expeditions led by Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen.  Reading it recently, I wondered if we have been living through a golden age of artistic exploration, with a new series of 'firsts', as writers, filmmakers, sound artists and photographers have followed in the footsteps of the explorers and scientists, recording the environment or making site-specific work on the ice.  Perhaps this pioneering period can be said to have come to an end with the first Antarctic Biennale.  According to an article in Slate, 'the current plan is for the artists to construct installations in Antarctica that will be documented and removed, and then to show some of the works later in Venice. The culturati have officially reached the end of the world.'

For most of her stay in 1994-5, Sara Wheeler was hosted by the US National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists & Writers Programme.  Their website provides a fascinating insight into the range of cultural work that has taken place under its auspices.  There are very few household names - the most famous is Werner Herzog, who made his enjoyable documentary Encounters at the End of the World there in 2006 (the shot of a penguin walking in the wrong direction to certain death has become famous).  Herzog's musical collaborator Henry Kaiser had already been there and it was footage he had taken on his trip that persuaded Herzog to take on the project.

The list of people who preceded Sara Wheeler on the program is not long - some historians and science writers, illustrators and photographers (who must all go south highly conscious of the heroic efforts of Ponting and Hurley) and one poet, Donald Finkel, who wrote two books about Antarctica.  Barry Lopez went too - the program's website lists two articles, published in 1989 and 1994, and "future book." Wheeler mentions Lopez once or twice in Terra Incognita.  She recalls how Ranulph Fiennes had scoffed at the idea that the Antarctic can provide a transcendental experience: "I prayed for help there, but I would have done so in Brixton.  Mr Lopez writes about it but he's hardly been there at all." Wheeler's footnote to this: 'Lopez is an established and highly respected author who has visited Antarctica five times.  His trips were not exercises in seeing how dead he could get - he went to see, and to learn.'

Herbert Ponting, A Cavern in an Iceberg, 1910

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Interestingly, according to the list, Kim Stanley Robinson was in Antarctica at the same time as Sara Wheeler.  I rather wish they had encountered each other because she is quite amusing on cultural differences between America and Britain.  Her book was conceived and written in the tradition of British travel writing (her favourite is The Road to Oxiana) whilst Robinson was researching his science fiction novel Antarctica.  The one other artist she did spend time with on her second trip, which coincided with the end of the Antarctic winter, was a watercolourist called Lucia deLeiris.  They shared a hut on the frozen sea and there, she writes, 'the landscape spoke to me so directly that it no longer seemed to be made of corporeal ice.'

At the end of the book, before leaving Antarctica, Wheeler returns to the Dry Valleys where she had experienced a memorable hike the previous summer.  On that earlier occasion she had been visiting scientists studying Lake Fryxell, its surface 'filled with tiny white bubbles and twisted into apocalyptic configurations - a fall might land you face down on a sword reminiscent of Excalibur.'  The opportunity arose to take a walk up the valley, the passing Suess and Canada Glaciers, where she noted a mummified seal on the moraine, and coming eventually to Lake Bonney, where 'ribboned crystals imprisoned in the ice glimmered like glowworms.  It was swathed in light pale as an unripe lemon.'  Now, months later, after the long polar night and a brief return to England, she was back.  

'I knew this landscape, but I had never seen the pink glow of dawn over the Canada Glacier, or the panoply of sunset over the Suess, or in between, sunlight travelling from one peak to the next and never coming down to us on the lake.  We lived in a bowl of shadow during those days.  One morning the sun appeared for ten minutes in the cleft between Canada and the mountain next to it, and everyone stopped working to look up. The lake was carpeted with compacted snow, and from the middle, where the Canada came tumbling down in thick folds, the Suess was cradled by mountains like a cup of milky liquid.'

Weatherland

I only recently got round to reading Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies and can highly recommend it to readers of this blog.  A book like this will cover some familiar ground – Gawain’s winter journey, Lear goading the storm, Turner’s light, Constable’s clouds, Dickens’ fog – but it is written so well that you never feel like you’re just being told things you already know.  On the Wordsworths, to choose just one example, she points out that their appreciation of weather turned on ‘very specific moments of transformation – when the sun suddenly strikes through cloud, for example, or when a figure is glimpsed through fog.’  She quotes Dorothy noting ‘her favourite birch tree coming to life: “it was yielding to the gusty wind with all its tender twigs, the sun upon it and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshine show […] It was like a spirit of water.” The earth-rooted tree takes flight in air, dissolves into a water spirit and, and glitters in the sun.’

The whole history of English literature seems to be contained in the book but it cannot of course be completely comprehensive.  There is no George Eliot for instance - just as I was finishing Weatherland, Mrs Plinius was rereading Middlemarch and reminded me that the love between Will and Dorothea finally surfaces during a thunderstorm.  This though is an example of ‘significant weather’, a novelist’s device deplored by Julian Barnes who, I learnt from Weatherland, originally intended his novel Metroland to be called No Weather, since he was determined to avoid using it as a symbol of anything.  The book's scope is restricted to England and there are moments when Alexandra Harris comes across as very English herself (as she did in Romantic Moderns - see my post on 'The bracing glory of our clouds').  She refers, for example, to Milton’s Paradise, where the seasons are fixed and bountiful and ‘Eve lays out a spread for the visiting archangel Raphael’, observing that Eve may have been ‘the only picnicker in history to remain completely free from concerns about the weather.’  Hard to imagine, say, a Californian academic writing this!

Abraham Hondius, The Frozen Thames, 1677

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Weatherland takes inspiration at various points from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a book I have referred to here before.  My favourite scenes in Orlando concern the icing over of the Thames, when birds suddenly freeze in the air and Orlando falls in love with a Muscovite princess.  Woolf herself had read an evocative account of the winter of 1608 in Thomas Dekker's The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London, which refers to a new 'pavement of glass' and fish trapped below a thick roof of ice.  Here, from Weatherland's chapter 'On Freezeland Street', are three more responses to those surreal transformations of the city, which only came to an end when the demolition of London Bridge made the river swifter, deeper and permanently liquid. 

• Poetry: John Taylor, Thames boatman and self-styled water-poet, composed The Cold Tearme: Or the Frozen Age: Or the Metamorphosis of the River of Thames in 1621.  He compared the ice to a pastry crust and the freezing wind to a barber's razor, 'turning Thames streames, to hard congealed flakes, / And pearled water drops to Christall cakes.'  He describes visitors coming to the Frost Fair, 'Some for two Pots at Tables, Cards or Dice: / Some slipping in betwixt two cakes of Ice.'  Here he added a rueful note in the margin, 'Witnesse my selfe'.  

• Painting: the view reproduced above is by one of the many artists who came over to England from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.  'While Englishmen produced diagrammatic engravings of the Frost Fairs, labelling the attractions, Hondius produced an essay in atmosphere.  His expansive sky, worthy of the Netherlands, is flushed with the apricot pinks of a winter sunset.'  Alexandra Harris imagines the effect the frozen river would have had on his imagination.  At around the same time he painted a ship stuck in the pack ice of Greenland, Arctic Adventure.  'The Thames was a noisy, busy river, but in its frozen state it transported Hondius to the desolate edges of the world.'

• Music: John Dryden may have been inspired by the Frost Fair of 1683-4 when he wrote the libretto for Purcell's King Arthur.  Together 'they wanted to freeze and melt the human voice, dramatising in the process the freezing and melting of the the heart.'  The evil Saxon magician Osmond strikes his wand on the ground and magically summons up 'a prospect of winter in frozen countries.'  Then the personification of Cold sings slowly in C minor, chosen as the coldest key, and is followed by a chorus of cold people, whose stuttering singing mimics the chattering of teeth.  The whole masque is conjured to demonstrate the warmth of love, but it is a deception played on Emmeline, who is betrothed to Arthur.  His plan is foiled though and at the end of the opera he is cast into a dungeon whilst Arthur and Emmeline are reunited.  

There are numerous versions of the 'Cold Song' online, some pretty strange.  I've chosen here a  concert version by Andreas Scholl; you can also see a video for this where the singer is dressed in a pale suit, looking lost near some tower blocks.  Incidentally, the Prelude to the Frost Scene was the basis for Michael Nyman's 'Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' in The Draughtsman's Contract and was recently used again by the Pet Shop Boys in 'Love Is a Bourgeois Construct'.