Pine River and Lone Peak

I've been looking in this 1991 anthology for any interesting landscape-related poems that Peter H. Lee didn't include in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, a book I discussed here nineteen years ago. I soon found one - the first poem in the book is a 1580 kasa by Chŏng Ch'ŏl (1537-94) which Lee calls The Wanderings (1580). Its Korean title is Kwandong pyŏlgok^* - sometimes rendered as the Song of Diamond Mountain or Song of the East Coast. Kwangdong is the name of the region that contains the spectacular Diamond Mountains (Geumgangsan), which I have discussed here before in relation to the artists they inspired. Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem begins in Seoul where the king appoints him governor. He heads north and endures a sleepless night at Chorwon, a town which is now right on the North Korean border. After encountering magpies chattering on an old royal tomb (at least metaphorically), he sets off for the mountains, letting 'my staff lead me'. He walks through Hundred Rivers Canyon to Myriad Falls Grotto, and admires the falling water: 'there silver rainbows, / dragons with jade tails, / turning and coiling, spurt cataracts.' 

In an ideal world someone would have written an illustrated guide to the Diamond Mountains, detailing all the most famous scenic spots, arranged alphabetically or geographically, and illustrating them with literary quotations, paintings and contemporary photographs. One reason my ideal library contains no such volume is that it would be a little hard to write this now, since many of the beauty spots are in North Korea. And, of course, while the mountains and sea might have been familiar to Chŏng Ch'ŏl, specific sites he visited have gone. Early in the poem he passes through Pyohunsa Temple which is still there, but it is the only one of the Diamond Mountains' four great temples that survived the Korean War - American bombers destroyed Singyesa, Jangansa and Changansa. Another temple, Naksansa, was devestated by fire in 2005, although most of its buildings only dated from the fifties, when it was rebuilt after having been reduced to rubble in the war. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited Naksana, where he got up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the sea. Naksana is one of the Gwandong Palgyeong, eight scenic spots along the eastern coast of Korea which became famous in the sixteenth century. 

Gim Hongdo, Lake Samilpo 

from an album of late 18th century Landscapes Around Mt. Geumgangsan 

Source: Google Art

Lake Samilpo is another famous landscape. It sounds lovely but is now inaccessible, north of the border. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited and found six red letters on a cliff commemorating the four knights of Silla. 'After three days here / where did they go?' Legend has it that these four Hwarang stayed for three days and nights because they were captivated by the beautiful scenery (Samilpo means Three Days Cove). The Hwarang were Korea's elite male warriors, the 'flowering youth' schooled in Buddhism who visited mountains to train and try to receive supernatural guidance. They flourished as fighters between the mid-6th and mid-7th centuries, after which they became more of a social elite (they feature in later poems like the mid-8th century 'Ode to Knight Kipa': 'Knight, you are the towering pine / That scorns frost, ignores snow.') These four had been in the Diamond Mountains and were on their way down the coast to take part in a martial arts competition. Chŏng Ch'ŏl wonders where the four would have stayed next: 'Were they sitting at Clear Torrent Arbor / or on Myriad View Terrace?' 

Peter H. Lee discusses Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem in his History of Korean Literature. He says 'the reader feasts on a continuous unfolding of scenes described from various perspectives, encompassing both the sky and sea, and engaging all the senses ... Chŏng’s bold descriptions show great skill in conveying a magnificent scene of nature in simple but carefully chosen words.' I will end here with the poet's description of Mirror Cove, which is northeast of Gangnung and was another of the Eight Scenes of Gwandong.  

Behind the old pines rimming like hedges

I scan a ten-mile long beach

like ironed and stretched white silk; 

the water is calm and clear, 

I can count the grains of sand.

 

Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm

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

Antonín Mánes, Landscape with Temple Ruins, 1827-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Otakar Lebeda, Mountain Lake in the Krkonoše Mountains, 1896

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

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

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

Sunlit emptiness

 

West Lake, Hangzhou
Source: Wikimedia

I've just read Love & Time: The Poems of Ou-Yang Hsiu, a slim volume of J. P. Seaton translations published by the Copper Canyon Press in 1989. It includes Ou-Yang's series of ten poems entitled West Lake Is Good, which popularised the tz'u form (ci in pinyin) where verse is fitted into the form of a pre-existing song. His West Lake poems (the lake is in Hangzhou - see my earlier post on it) were written to the tune Picking Mulberries. I guess it would be like someone writing a set of poems about Windermere using the rhythms and rhyme scheme of 'Scarborough Fair'. Ouyang also wrote some beautiful landscape poems in the short shih (shi) style, like 'Drifting at I-Ch'uan' in which a stream grows in a gorge and rapids turn a tiny boat. 'Birds on the sand turn too: / away from me / and fly, to the grove's green tips.'  

Ouyang Xiu (1007-72 - I'm swapping now to pinyin spelling) had the Zuiweng Pavilion constructed at Langya Mountain near Chuzhou. It was built to his design by a Buddhist priest of the mountain, Zhi Xian, and you can now build one yourself – I see that a Lego set is available to buy! Ouyang called it The Pavilion of the Old Drunkard, but as Richard Strassberg writes in Inscribed Landscapes, what Ouyang ‘cares about is to be amid mountains and streams. The joy of the landscape has been captured in his heart, and wine drinking merely expresses this.’ Ouyang’s calligraphy was engraved at the pavilion in 1048 but because it was difficult to make rubbings, Su Shi (1037-1101) rewrote it in larger characters (rubbings of this still exist). Inscribed Landscapes includes a further text on another pavilion ordered near here by Ouyang Xiu: The Pavilion of Joyful Abundance, which is by a spring at the foot of Mount Abundance, Fengshan. 

In 1070 Ouyang wrote his ‘Account of the Pavilion on Mount Xian’ (1070), an early description of the ‘principle whereby a place becomes known through a particular person’, as Stephen Owen says in his Anthology of Chinese Literature. ‘Mount Xian looks down on the river Han', Ouyang wrote. 'when I gaze at it, I can barely make it out. It is surely the smallest of the major mountains, yet its name is particularly well known in Jingzhou. This is, of course, because it of the persons associated with it. And who are those persons? None other than Yang Hu and Du Yu.’ Yang Hu and Du Yu were governors during the Jin Dynasty and Mount Xian, near Xiangyang (formerly Xiangfan) had a ‘stele for shedding tears’ dedicated to Yang Hu.  

Of course Ouyang himself created sites of future literary pilgrimage - not just the pavilions near Chuzhou. Pingshan Hall was built in 1048 when he was prefecture chief of Yangzhou. Su Shi was again on hand to commemorate the older poet, writing a poem after Ouyang’s death on an occasion when he revisited the hall. It can still be visited today - it is in the western part of Daming Temple, on the middle peak of Shugang Mountain near Yangzhou - but it has been destroyed and re-built many times over the years. Stephen Owen’s anthology includes ‘An Account of the Reconstruction of Level Mountain Hall’ written in the seventeenth century by Wei Xi (1624-80). Pingshan means ‘Level Mountain’ and comes from the fact that the mountains from this viewpoint all appear at the same level. J. P. Seaton translated one of Ouyang's poems on this landscape. He looks out and leans into 'sunlit emptiness, / the mountain's colours in the mist / now there, now gone.'

Tidmarsh Mill

 

Dora Carrington, Tidmarsh Mill, c. 1918

 

I recently read the new Frances Spalding book The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars. This painting is included in the chapter 'Landscape and Places of the Mind' which mainly discussed the Nash brothers. Paul was at the Slade with Carrington and John became her close friend. 'He taught her wood engraving and she shared with him her enjoyment of authors such as Gilbert White, William Cobbett and Richard Jefferies.' Tidmarsh Mill was influenced by Carrington's love of the Pre-Raphaelites. Spalding praises another painting from 1921 and suggests 'Carrington might have achieved further success with the painting of landscape had her personal life been less fraught and her artistic interests less diverse.' Interesting, although I've always liked the Tate's Spanish Landscape with Mountains (c. 1924), which Spalding doesn't mention, one of two paintings completed at Tidmarsh Mill but begun in Spain

In a survey like the Real and the Romantic it's always fascinating to see who gets included and who doesn't. She mentions for example that Eric Ravilious's 'reputation has soared' - he was completely ignored in Charles Harrison's 1981 book English Art and Modernism 1900-1939'. Her chapter 'Landscape and Places of the Mind' begins with realist street scenes painted by the East London Group. These paintings have started drawing attention recently for the way they capture a city that has undergone huge changes since the war - she cites the recent book by Spitalfields blogger The Gentle Author.  Spalding says 'actual talent within the group was uneven' but reproduces a nice painting by Elwin Hawthorne, Cumberland Market (1931), and suggests that empty scenes by artists like Harold Steggles have an Edward Hopperish quality.

Other landscape art covered in The Real and the Romantic:

• Chapter 1, 'Pitiless Realism' - she includes the familiar blasted visions of mud, and broken trees by John and Paul Nash, but also praises another striking First World War scene by D. Y. Cameron, The Battlefield of Ypres (1919), empty and partially covered in snow.

• Chapter 3, 'On the Move' - 'few landscape artists settled long enough to imbibe the spirit of a place.' Scenes painted on their travels by Charles Cundell, Matthew Smith and David Bomberg are discussed. She also covers depictions of travel itself, like Eric Ravilious's Train Landscape (1940).

• Chapter 5, 'Beginning Again' - among other things this covers Ben Nicholson's move towards abstraction and reproduces a couple of his semi-abstract views of Italy and St. Ives.

 

 

Winifred Knights, Edge of Abruzzi: Boat with Three People on a Lake, 1924-30   

 

• Chapter 8, 'Make it Real' - a chapter arguing that qualities like stillness and clarity were as much a part of Modernism as the impetus to 'make it new'. Winifred Knights' painting exemplifies this. Spalding also discusses Evelyn Dunbar, Tristram Hillier and the etcher F. L. Griggs. The chapter ends with another aspect of 'the real', Alfred Wallis's fishing scenes drawing on his own lived experiences.  
  

• Chapter 9, 'Revivalism' - the artists returned to for inspiration in this period included Canaletto (Algernon Newton's paintings, which look as if they were done in the late eighteenth century), Samuel Palmer (Graham Sutherland), and the English watercolourists (Eric Ravilious).  

• Chapter 12, 'The Spanish Civil War, Mondrian in London and Neo-Romanticism' - this final chapter gives a sense of the 'multiplicity of styles' being pursued in the late thirties. She discusses John Piper's move away from abstraction and reproduces Graham Bell's Thomasen Park, Bolton, a misty view of the city painted at the urging of anthropologist Tom Harrison. Neo-Romanticism is briefly covered but the cut-off means we only get to see an early drawing by John Minton.

The Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake

I have been looking back at some books I read before starting this blog and have never got round to mentioning. One of these is Simplicissimus, the picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, written in 1668 and translated for Dedalus by Mike Mitchell. Near the end of the book, its hero Simplicius hears various tales told about 'the Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake on one of the highest mountains in the neighbourhood.' (Wikipedia's entry on this Black Forest lake begins, disappointingly: 'the Mummelsee is a 17-metre-deep lake...') The stories told to Simplicius concern disappearing animals and sightings of water sprites. On one occasion, he learns, a Duke of Württemberg tried to measure the depth of the lake with a length of twine but his boat started to sink and he had to abandon the attempt. Curious about this strange place, Simplicius decides to set off to see it for himself.

When he arrives with his companion after a walk of less than six hours, the two of them polish of the food and drink they brought and then proceed with some scientific observations, drawing a map and tasting the water to see if it would explain why some trout that had been introduced on one occasion all died. They then locate a spot 'where the water, otherwise as clear as crystal, seems to be pitch black on account of its awesome depth'. Ignoring his companion's advice, Simplicius throws stones into the lake. Storm clouds begin to gather and, looking into the water, he sees creatures swimming up from the depths, bringing back the stones. One of them, the Prince of Mummelsee, comes to the surface and takes Simplicius back down with him. Eventually they reach the centre of the earth where they discuss politics, religion and geography. He doesn't spend long there before returning to the surface, but he does give a memorable short description of the way this land of the sylphs is lit by the lakes of the world.

'While I was there I observed how the sun shone on each lake in turn and sent its rays down to these awesome depths, making it as bright in this abyss as on the surface and even casting shadows. The lakes were like windows for the sylphs through which they received both light and warmth. Even if they didn't always come directly, because the sides of some lakes were twisted, they were transmitted by reflection because nature had set whole slabs of crystal, diamonds and rubies where necessary in the angles of the cliffs.'

The Mummelsee
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The magical lake of Mummelsee also appears in a poem by Eduard Mörike, who I wrote about here last month. 'The Ghosts of Mummelsee' is one of his poems later set to music by Hugo Wolf. There is a New York Festival of Song blog post on this Lied, which gives an English translation by Charles L. Cingolani. The narrator, hiding in some bushes, sees a funeral procession for the king of the lake. The ghosts walk over the water and then enter it through a sparkling gate. However, there is a twist at the end when they realise they have been watched...

How lovely the fires glow on the water! 
They flare and then turn green;
Fog moves in clusters along the shore,
The pond is turning into a sea—
Be still!
Is there something stirring out there?

In the middle a twitching—For heaven’s sake! Help!
They come back again, they are coming!
A bellowing in the reeds, a crunching in the rushes;
Make haste, take flight!
Away!
They sense trouble, they are on my tracks!

The floating islands of Lake Vadimon

In these interminable lockdown days it is easy to get sick of walking the same streets over and over again. Of course there is always Google Earth, although I always suspect I may not always be looking at wha tI think I am. I thought I would travel in the footsteps of my blog namesake, Pliny the Younger, to the small lake 'called Vadimon'. According to Wikipedia its waters have now almost evaporated - 'the lake is almost completely underground and fed by sulphurous springs that pour milky waters into it'. But is there anything really still to see? Google Maps does show a small blue circle but Google Earth doesn't seem to allow you any closer than the image above (photograph taken in 2011). I think the 'lake' is to the right of the road, somewhere in that field.  

Pliny begins his letter by observing that one doesn't have to travel far to see natural wonders, sometimes they are practically on our doorstep. It is a point always worth bearing in mind, although I think I've seen all there is to see within a short Covid-restricted walk from our home. He then describes 'one of these curiosities', a lake

'perfectly circular in form, like a wheel lying on the ground; there is not the least curve or projection of the shore, but all is regular, even and just as if it had been hollowed and cut out by the hand of art. The water is of a clear sky-blue, though with somewhat of a greenish tinge; its smell is sulphurous, and its flavour has medicinal properties, and is deemed of great efficacy in all fractures of the limbs, which it is supposed to heal. Though of but moderate extent, yet the winds have a great effect upon it, throwing it into violent agitation. No vessels are suffered to sail here, as its waters are held sacred; but several floating islands swim about it, covered with reeds and rushes, and with whatever other plants the surrounding marshy ground and the edge itself of the lake produce in greater abundance.'

Pliny then explains how these islands sometimes move in a cluster and sometimes get dispersed, seeming to race each other. Grazing sheep from the surrounding fields board the islands, seemingly oblivious to the fact they have left dry land. The lake empties into a river which,'after running a little way, sinks underground, and, if anything is thrown in, it brings it up again where the stream emerges.' He signs off the letter by saying: 'I have given you this account because I imagined it would not be less new, nor less agreeable, to you than it was to me; as I know you take the same pleasure as myself in contemplating the works of nature.'

Ten Skies and 13 Lakes

‘The only way one can understand landscape is through time.’ - James Benning

This is a still from TEN SKIES (2004) a film by James Benning that lasts over two hours and consists of ten static shots of the sky over California.  You can currently watch it all on YouTube.  Claudia Slanar has written about this film and its predecessor 13 LAKES (2004) that the attention they demand ‘leads to a fluctuation between impatience, immersion and digression.’ Scott MacDonald has described the experience of seeing them for the first time as like going into a horror film, where the viewer has to decide to ‘endure whatever the film is about to send their way.’ By the third ten minute sequence it will be clear that almost nothing is going to happen. So what exactly do they offer? MacDonald suggests they provide a kind of visual and auditory retraining. ‘Again and again during a viewing of either film, we ‘awake’ to realise that our minds have moved elsewhere, into daydream, memory, worry, planning… and we wrestle our consciousness back to the screen and soundtrack, often to realise that in the interim things have altered more than we might have expected.’

In these films, landscape is transformed directly into art. As Slanar says, they 'represent the concept of nature as a ’ready-made’, as a pre-existing object that is turned into a work of art by means of an artistic signature.’  The fragmentary soundtrack of Ten Skies ‘subtly evokes a sense of place without depending on synchronous sound’. She relates Benning's films to other examples of slow cinema – Peter Hutton's Time and Tide (2000) and At Sea (2007), Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat (2006), Abbas Kiorostami’s Five (2003).  Her essay, and that of Scott MacDonald, appear in an excellent compilation dedicated to James Benning published in 2007 by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. The book discusses his work's engagement with ideas of place and the rapidly changing American landscape.  As Julie Ault says, the films reveal a persistent iconography – ‘groups of cows, passing trains, emitting smokestacks, farmland being ploughed, billboards, gunshots, oil wells, highways, the Spiral Jetty and the Milwaukee neighbourhood where Benning was born and raised.’

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the subject of Casting a glance (2007): seventy-eight one-minute shots made during sixteen trips to the Jetty between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007.  The title refers to something Smithson said that evokes that idea of landscape as 'ready-made': ‘a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.’  Benning first saw Spiral Jetty almost twenty years earlier.  In those days it was much harder to find - he tried various roads from Rozel Point before finding one that led to wards the lake, then had to walk three miles to find it, submerged at that point under two feet of water.  I will end here with Benning's evocative description of encountering Spiral Jetty as a site constantly changing, illustrating his view that 'the only way one can understand landscape is through time.'

‘The Jetty is a barometer for both daily and yearly cycles. From morning to night its allusive, shifting appearance (radical or subtle) may be the result of a passing weather system or simply the changing angle of the sun. The yearly seasonal shifts and water level changes alter the growing salt crystals, the amount of algae in the water, and the presence of wildlife. The water may appear blue, red, purple, green, brown, silver, or gold. The sounds may come from a navy jet, wildlife, splashing water, a distant car radio, converging thunderstorms; or be a silence so still you can hear the blood moving through the veins in your ears.'

Viewing the Three Lakes

 

Hsieh T'iao

'Viewing the Three Lakes'

I have previously devoted a post to Hsieh Ling-yün (Xie Lingyun, 385-433), known as the founder of the shan-shui ("rivers-and-mountains") tradition in Chinese poetry.  Here I want to focus on Hsieh T'iao (Xie Tiao), a younger kinsman also known for his landscape poetry, who lived from 464-499.  His work is not easy to find online and his Wikipedia entry is currently just a stub.  However, I have actually quoted one of his poems before, 'Viewing the Three Lakes' - 'Red clouds mirrored where the waters meet. / From the red terrace -- birds returning, / the encircling plains, mosaic of river isles. / Inklings of spring's luxuriance / as autumn's last yellows fade...'

Cynthia L. Chennault has written a study of Hsieh's work.  In The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, she says that his poetry 'is perhaps best known for the rich variety of ways in which it describes qualities of light'.  She points to two ways in which he developed the nature writing tradition in Chinese poetry:

• Subject matter: his landscapes are expansive, more generalized, less 'vertical' and often include man-made features.
• Style: he uses syntactic variation to give more variety to his descriptions and incorporate emotional expression - a river as a metaphor for the poet's directional ambivalence, for instance.

Hsieh T'iao held various official posts and in 495 was made governor of Hsüan-ch'eng (Xuancheng).  'Hardly different from a hermit's life' he called it, with 'few law suits to hear on the grass-grown terrace.'  Hsieh built himself there a pavilion that would later feature in a poem by Li Po (Li Bai, 701-62) - 'Farewell to Uncle Yun, Imperial Librarian, at Xie Tiao Pavilion in Xuancheng'.  A century later another great poet, Tu Mu (Du Mu, 803-52), came to the city and saw Hsieh's old home.  There he wrote poems about Kai-yuan temple, built earlier in the T'ang Dynasty, long after Hsieh's time ('the brook's sound enters the dreams of monks, / and the moonlight glows on its stucco walls.')

Moving further ahead in time to 1170, another great poet, Lu Yu (Lu You, 1125-1209), visited Hsieh's old residence, and also the Southern capital of Chin-Ling (Jinling) where Hsieh had lived and written poetry.  There is a good article by Nathan Woolley, based on Lu's 'An Account of a Journey to Shu', of his time at Chin-Ling.  It quotes three of Hsieh's poems - here are the opening lines of 'About to Set Forth From Stone Fortress, I Ascend the Beacon-fire Loft':

Wavering and hesitant, I pine over the capital;
With dragging steps, I tread up to the storied loft.
Seen from a height, the palace grounds and gate towers seem close by,
But as I peer into the distance, windblown clouds are many.

Departure for Hsieh was hard when all he could see beyond the city was upsurging hills and a sea of dashing waves. 

Ten poems by Hsieh appear in the anthology New Songs from a Jade Terrace (compiled 534-45) but none of them are 'landscape' poetry.  Five might be considered 'still life' - 'object poems' on a lamp, a candle, a bed, a mirror stand and falling plum blossom.  He also wrote a set of 'Songs of the Drum and Flute', dedicated to the Prince of Sui which Cynthia Chennault describes as charming early works. Arthur Waley translated one of them in his seminal anthology, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919), a 'Song of the Men of Chin-Ling' who are marching back to the capital.

The green canals of the city stretch on and on 
And its high towers stretch up and up. 
Flying gables lean over the bridle-road: 
Drooping willows cover the Royal Aqueduct.

Hsieh T'iao did not make it into our sixth century - he died in prison in 499.  It was a sad echo of the fate of his predecessor Hsieh Ling-yün, who was executed following a third and final banishment from court.  A year before his death, Hsieh T'iao wrote a 'Poetic Essay Requiting a Kindness', addressed to his fellow poet Shen Yüeh (it is the subject of a 1990 article by Richard Mather).  After Hsieh's death, Shen wrote a lament for him.  'His melodies resound in tune with bells and lithophones; / His thoughts soar high above the winds and clouds.'

Chinese edition of The Selected Works of Xie Tiao and Yu Xin

Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow

The Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli (1127–1206) currently has a mere three-line entry on Wikipedia and there is no anthology of his verse in translation currently in print.  However, it is easy to pick up a copy of Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow second-hand - something I've done, as you can see above. The book's title comes from a four-line poem which begins 'the pure wind makes me chant poems, / the bright moon urges me to drink.'  There is quite a lot of drinking in these poems (the translations by Jonathan Chaves, published in 1975, perhaps indicate their age by the way he describes this as getting high).  A love of poetry also comes through - for example in the lovely short poem 'Reading by the Window', in which Yang opens a book of Tang Dynasty poetry to find inside a peach blossom petal, still fresh, that had been caught inside the previous spring.  But nature is his main theme and there are examples in this book of what can unhesitatingly be described as 'landscape poems', recalling a view seen from a boat, a mountain temple or a moon viewing terrace. 

Landscape poems like these may frame the world like a painting but their words are able to convey sound and motion and time passing.  There are two 'Evening Lake Scenes' for example, in the first of which Yang watches geese in Vs and crows in flocks, flying over a lake and taking their time settling down for the night.  In the second he describes the sunset:

I sit watching the sun set over the lake.
The sun is not swallowed by mountains or clouds:
it descends inch by inch, then disappears completely,
leaving no trace where it sinks into the water.

In his introduction, Chaves highlights Yang's 'obsession with capturing the momentary changes in natural phenomena'.  This is from a poem recording his impressions as he crossed between Zhedong and Yongfeng on a spring day in 1179.

The sunlight must be moving the waves by itself;
the sky is calm, and there is no wind.

Wu Zhen, Fisherman, c. 1350

One of the Chinese paintings reproduced as illustrations in Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow

Yang Wanli is the last poet in David Hinton's anthology, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poets of Ancient China. Hinton says that 'with him China's rivers-and-mountains poetry had opened up virtually all of its possibilities'. He highlights Yang's adherence to Ch'an Buddhism and the way it gave rise to a 'crystalline attention to things themselves ... The rivers-and-mountains realm was the natural terrain for this attentiveness, as its grandeur so easily calls one from the limitations of self to the expansiveness of a mirror-like empty mind that contains all things.'  Here, to conclude, are four lines from Hinton's translation of a poem Yang wrote after a hike to Universal-Completion Monastery. 

As our boat lacing mists angles off the cove's willow shores,
cloud mountains appear and disappear among the willows.

And the beauty of climbing a mountain while adrift on a lake?
It's this lake's mind - that gaze holding the mountain utterly.

The mountain tops, like little isles appear'd

Salomon Gessner, Bucolic Scene, 1767

My post yesterday was about a nineteenth century French-speaking Swiss writer from Geneva; this one is about an eighteenth century German-speaking Swiss poet from Zurich.  However, as can be seen above, Salomon Gessner (1730-88) was also a visual artist.  Here is a snatch of his poetry, describing autumn. It is taken from an 1809 translation of Gessner's Idylls (1756-72).  According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 'his pastorals were translated into 20 languages, including Welsh, Latin, and Hebrew. The English translation ran through many editions and was admired by the Romantic writers Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Wordsworth.'  However, I see from Wikipedia that 'The New International Encyclopædia (1905) finds his writing “insipidly sweet and monotonously melodious,” and attributes Gessner's popularity to the taste of a generation nursed on Rousseau.'

O'er every vine of gold and purple hue
The sun its animating lustre threw;
And every curling branch, whose friendly shade
Waved o'er his cot, beneath the zephyr play’d.
Clear was the sky, o'er all the valley's bed
The low-land vapours like a lake were spread;
Amidst whose floating surface lightly rear'd
The mountain tops, like little isles appear'd;
Where smoaking huts and fruitful groves were seen
In autumn's richest vest of gold and green.

Salomon Gessner, Pastoral landscape with two women and a boy

playing a flute in front of a herm of Pan, 1787

Gessner was on my mind today as I saw the painting above in the British Museum.  It was in the Prints and Drawings room, in a display of art linked to the sketch by Joseph Anton Koch they recently purchased from the Brian Sewell estate (see my post on it last year).  Gessner's painting was the basis for an 1805 etching by another artist I have discussed here before, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe.  The British Museum also owns an etching by Kolbe of the memorial to Gessner which stands in Zurich's Platspitz Park.  In it, 'a well-dressed couple and child looking at Gessner's tomb in the form of a Greek memorial with a low relief sculpture, set behind a railing in woodland.'

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, The Monument to Salomon Gessner in Zurich, c. 1807

In their current exhibition, the British Museum curators have put Gessner's Pastoral Landscape on show next to a different memorial to Gessner, this one by Johann Heinrich Bleuler.  The etching was published in the year of Gessner's death and shows a memorial to him situated by a lake.  Was it imaginary, like Caspar David Friedrich's proposal for a monument to Goethe?  If not, is there still something resembling this at Lake Klöntal, a permanent presence of a landscape painter in the landscape he painted?  Yes, it would seem there is, according to the local tourism website and you can do a nice walk to it. They describe the origin of the inscription thus: 'Sie wurde ihm von zwei Verehrern gewidmet, die sich 1788 zur Einweihung des Gedenksteins mit Tränen in den Augen um den Hals fielen und küssten.' ('It was dedicated to him by two devotees who fell around the neck and kissed each other in 1788 with tears in their eyes for the inauguration of the memorial stone' - Google Translate). The writing looks quite amateurish and crudely done, but clearly those admirers meant well.

Johann Heinrich Bleuler, Commemorative stone in memory of Salomon Gessner, 

at Lake Klöntal, Glarus, 1788

Ellen's Isle, Loch Katrine

Robert S. Duncanson, Vesuvius and Pompeii, 1870

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I now have just over a month left of my project to tweet a landscape a day for 2018.  It is never possible to predict how many 'likes' these will get - obviously I feel they're all interesting or beautiful in one way or another.  Possibly my least popular one this year, with just two 'likes' (one of which came from my mother!) was a Robert S. Duncanson landscape painting showing Vesuvius and Pompeii.  This, despite the fact I posted it with the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth...  Clearly if anyone was looking for this hashtag during that particular month, they were not interested in my Duncanson painting.  He may have been the first prominent African-American landscape artist, but his style of painting is perhaps too unfashionable to excite much buzz on social media.  But his paintings are interesting in their own right - in my tweet I said that "in this view of Pompeii I particularly like that painting-within-a-painting, a large fresco resembling an outdoor cinema."

Robert S. Duncanson was born in 1821 in the state of New York. His grandfather was a freed slave from Virginia and his father lived there, until growing opposition to freed black men persuaded him to move north.  The family settled in Michigan and then, as a young man, Robert Duncanson taught himself painting in Cincinnati, 'the Athens of the West'.  His first significant landscape painting, Cliff Mine, Lake Superior (1848) was acquired by Charles Avery, one of several abolitionist patrons who bought his work. In 1853 he visited Europe and a year later he collaborated with the prominent African-American photographer James Presley Ball on an anti-slavery panoramic painting, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.  When the Civil War began, he moved to Canada and then Britain, where he was particularly impressed by the Scottish Highlands.  He returned to America and died at the age of just 51, possibly due to the effects of lead poisoning.  The view of Vesuvius and Pompeii is thus a late work, inspired by his travels almost twenty years earlier.

Robert S. Duncanson, Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River, 1851

Until this year, Duncanson did not have a tombstone.  However, it was good to come upon a report in the Detroit Free Press (via a JStor article last week), explaining that this is about to change. 

'For more than a century, his body has remained in Monroe, about 40 miles south of Detroit, with nothing but grass growing over his grave. Now, a small foundation marks the site of his burial awaiting the arrival of a tombstone.

“No one has asked about him — not in my lifetime,” said Michael Huggins, 55, the manager of the Historic Woodland Cemetery for the past two decades, and the person who helped find the exact location of Duncanson’s burial plot. 

[... Now] nearly a century and a half later, Monroe resident Dora Kelley is looking to rewrite a chapter of Duncanson’s life. Kelley worked with LeClair Monuments in Lambertville to design a sleek black granite tombstone for Duncanson complete with his full name, the year of his death and an etched version of his Ellen’s Isle painting from the DIA’s collection.  Kelley also chose a quote from the late artist to grace the monument, which speaks to Duncanson’s unprecedented position as a freeborn artist in the era of slavery: “I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.”

Robert S. Duncanson, Ellen's Isle, Loch Katrine, 1871

Down the stream to the City of Camelot

Illustration from Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498

Source: John Rylands Library

I have written before here about the description of nature in Gawain and the Green Knight, with its journey through a wintry Britain, where 'ice-cold water poured from the clouds / and froze before it hit the grey ground.'  Sadly there are no such descriptions in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, even where landscape features in the story.  The lake, for example, into which Excalibur is thrown by Sir Bedevere, has to be imagined by the reader.  Tennyson, in his reworking of Malory, Idylls of the King, gives us more to go on: Bedevere takes zigzag paths past 'juts of pointed rock' until he comes to 'the shining levels of the lake' where there are dewy pebbles, bulrush beds and 'wild water lapping on the crag.'  Malory though, does make Bedevere say to the dying king that he had seen "nothing but waves and winds" a phrase somehow evocative because of its concision.  As I wrote here previously, these words begin a poem by France Horovitz, 'The Crooked Glen' - the title referring to 'Camboglana', the Celtic name for Birdoswald, one of the sites identified as the setting for Arthur's last battle.

The main way that landscape comes into Le Morte d'Arthur is through the book's locations, mentioned if not described, which cover the British Isles, France and sometimes further afield.  As a geographical region it feels both strange and familiar.  Often Malory himself provides a link with somewhere his readers will know, associating Camelot with Winchester, for example:

'Also Merlin let make by his subtilty that Balin's sword was put in a marble stone standing upright as great as a mill stone, and the stone hoved always above the water and did many years, and so by adventure it swam down the stream to the City of Camelot, that is in English Winchester.'

This sentence also illustrates again the way Malory's text might be unpacked and reimagined more fully - that magical stone heading downstream in a manner reminiscent of David Nash's Wooden Boulder.  As you read Malory you start to imagine an Arthurian Britain just below the surface, even in the Home Counties.  At one point he has King Arthur stay at the castle of Ascalot 'that is in English Guildford' - an identification probably due simply to its location between London and Arthur's intended destination, Winchester.

The topic of Arthurian topography is discussed by Geoffrey Ashe in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. He dismisses the idea that Camelot would have been an actual city, as opposed to a military headquarters: 'the claim of the Somerset hill fort Cadbury Castle carries unrivaled weight.'  There are places in Britain that may be the connected with a historical Arthur, like the ten battle sites mentioned by Nennius in his Historia Brittonum, and then there are places that are merely named for him (or, less frequently, Merlin, Tristram, Guenevere and Lancelot).  I mentioned a Welsh landscape feature, Arthur's Chair, in my abecadarian piece on the Itinerarium Kambriae of Gerald of Wales (1188).  This was a lofty spot with a well-shaped pool, fed by a spring, in which trout were sometimes seen.  Earlier in the century, Hermann of Tournai, travelling through Devon and Cornwall in 1113 encountered another Arthur's Chair and also Arthur's Oven (the latter may be what is now called King's Oven on Dartmoor).

Some Arthurian features are natural, others are ancient megaliths that have become linked to his legend.  In descending order of scale there are: a mountain - Ben Arthur in Scotland; the saddle-like hills that have suggested Seats and Chairs; five earthworks known as 'Round Tables'; and many stones - at least six called Arthur's Stone and eleven called Arthur's Quoit.  The idea of Arthur has been fused with local folklore in places, turning him into a giant. Thus, 'seated on King's Crags in Northumberland, he tossed a huge boulder at Guenevere on Queen's Crags - which are half a mile away.  It bounced off her comb and now lies on the ground between, showing the toothmarks.' Geoffrey Ashe goes on to describe the way this folkloric Arthur differs from the knight of Romance, in the manner of his survival after death.  In the chivalric stories, Arthur resides in the Isle of Avalon, but in folklore he sleeps with his knights in a cave.  Intriguingly though, these may both point to a common source deep in Celtic myth.  In 82 CE a Roman official in Britain (quoted by Plutarch) reported that the Britons believed in a god lying asleep in a cave, attended by spirits.  This was on an island, a warm and pleasant place "in the general direction of sunset".

The Lake of Ashes

Claude Lanzmann died this week - obituaries can be read here, here and here.  For all the praise that Shoah received, it can still feel as if the film is underrated, perhaps because to praise Lanzmann's settings and use of sound would seem like trivialising his subject.  I have considered trying to write here about landscape in Shoah but felt I could not really do the subject justice.  Shoah seems to demand a response as long and complex as the film itself, and its methods raise many questions about documentary methods and ethics.  However, Lanzmann's approach to landscape can be stated very simply.  Eschewing archive material, he let much of his interviews play out against footage of the sites the victims were talking about, shown as they appeared nearly four decades later: the remnants of concentration camps, rail tracks through dark forest trees, village streets revealing nothing of their past. Lanzmann's style can be seen in the context of other European films from the period that made use of atmospheric long takes - Stalker, Kings of the Road, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - but I can't think of anything remotely as powerful.  And Shoah still looks extraordinary in comparison with the imagery of contemporary filmmakers, such as Tacita Dean whose work I was discussing here last month.  If you have never watched the whole of Shoah, I cannot recommend it too highly.

Deep mellow shades breaking upon the view

Harriet Gouldsmith, A View of Hampstead Heath Looking Towards Cannon Place, 1818

I recently came across a curious publication in which a landscape painting is the narrator of its own story.  A Voice from a Picture, privately printed in 1837, was by 'A Female Artist'; a review three years later, revealed that the author was Harriet Gouldsmith Arnold (1787–1863), an English landscape painter.  This review can be read online, as can the full text of A Voice from a Picture.  According to the reviewer, 'the idea of making a picture tell its history is not new; but it will bear a new treatment'.  This is interesting initself - are there actually earlier examples of landscape paintings relating their autobiographies?  In her introduction, Gouldsmith (she used the name Arnold after her marriage in 1839) says that she hopes her little book will help spread the knowledge of art 'as the fittest guide to the instructive love of nature in her better forms.'

The painting begins its autobiography with an account of 'the sorrows, hopes, and fears' of its 'parent': an artist (male) who possessed 'an unfeigned delight for the sublimities and beauties of nature.' 

Often have I witnessed the feelings of my fond parent, whilst gazing upon the last gleams of the setting sun, - the deep mellow shades breaking upon the view, 'ere night shed silence and repose upon all earthly things; and often has grey morning, the sweet harbinger of another day, brought vigour and renewed exertion to his enthusiastic and unwearied mind.  At length, after many solitary wanderings, and anxious efforts, I became a Picture.  Then, again, new fears and anxieties arose. - What was to be thought of me, amongst the thousands of connoisseurs, amateurs, artists, and critics, whom I should be compelled to face?

The painting was right to be anxious.  It imagines being neglected like the 'unobtrusive works' of Richard Wilson, put into the shade by the flash and fire of Loutherbourg.  For a long time it hangs unregarded on a London wall, while the painter accumulates a body of work, and is then taken to be exhibited in Manchester, but remains unsold.  People praise it but, because the artist is not a big name, nobody will buy it.  More exhibitions and an auction follow, without success, and eventually the painter becomes so poor that he sells all his possessions, including the landscape painting.  Then, at the low point of the story, the painting gets 'carried into a back garret, to answer all the purpose of a chimney board.'  However, after the poor artist dies in a debtors prison, his work starts to become sought after.  Found and restored, the painting becomes highly praised and ends up decorating 'the mansion of nobility.'

Richard Wilson, Lake Avernus, c. 1765

Before leaving A Voice from a Picture I can't resist a digression, to quote an anecdote Gouldsmith includes as an illustration of the straits to which poverty reduces artists.  Here a landscape painting is actually worn.

'A party of English artists meeting together in Italy, for the purpose of making studies from nature.  The weather proving very sultry, the members proposed that all should take off their coats, which was strongly objected to by one of the party, but at last submitting to the others, a Waterfall was discovered on his back, his waistcoat having been made out of a picture of that subject.'

Harriet Gouldsmith was painting during the Golden Age of British landscape painting.  She first exhibited at the RA in 1807 and was elected to the Water Colour Society in 1813.  The painting below is a late work and can be found in the Egham Museum, which purchased it in 1985.  I wonder how its 'life' played out over the preceding 140 years...  Its subject, Magna Carta Island, was itself put up for sale four years ago, with an asking price of £3,950,000 (see the BBC's report).  This island includes a Grade II-listed house, built a few years before Gouldsmith's painting, that features a specially-built Charter Room to house the stone on which the charter is supposed to have been signed.  Perhaps someone should write A Voice from an Island, to relate the history of its owners since that day in 1215 when Runnymede took its place in the story of England.  The Times reported that as a result of the sale, Magna Carta Island has been acquired by a Chinese family.

Harriet Gouldsmith Arnold, Magna Carta Island, 1845

Primeval world

 

Josef Kuwasseg, The Period of the Muschelkalk, c. 1850

Source: The Universalmuseum Joanneum 

This remarkable vision of a prehistoric shoreline was painted by an Austrian landscape painter, Josef Kuwasseg (1799-1859).  The paleobotonist Franz Xaver Unger who commissioned a series of lithographs from him said that such paintings had "that mysterious charm which belongs to the contemplation of the distant past, and to the memory of our dreams."  This painting is reproduced in a sumptuously illustrated (and pricey) new book that I was given for Christmas, Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past.  It traces the ways artists have portrayed scenes from the distant past over the last two centuries, incorporating stylistic elements from Romanticism, Impressionism, Fauvism and Art Nouveau.  The author, New York art critic Zoë Lescaze, also reads into these old pictures of dinosaurs, flying reptiles and neanderthals the politics of paleontology (ongoing battles between rival scientists) and our wider anxieties about war and apocalypse. 

Josef Kuwasseg, Primeval world, c. 1850

Source: The Universalmuseum Joanneum 

I have referred briefly here before to paleoart, in describing an exhibition of John Martin's paintings at Tate Britain.  Martin imagined plesiosaurs attacking an ichthyosaur as if they were engaged in fierce naval combat.  But, 'if Martin's vision of prehistory is a nightmare, Kuwasseg's is a subtle and mysterious dream.  Water appears in every painting, not as a seething arena for reptilian combat, but in flowing rivers, mangrove deltas, jungle waterfalls, and luminous green lagoons.'  It is easy enough to find examples of Joseph Kuwasseg's 'real' landscape painting online, like the one I have included below, a view of the Leopoldsteinersee, a mountain lake in Styria.  Zoë Lescaze writes that in his more conventional landscape art,

'Kuwasseg frequently includes illuminated corridors - rivers, paths, or gaps in the trees - framed by darker houses, rocks, or foliage.  He incorporates these same visual tunnels in his prehistoric vistas, leading the viewers into carboniferous swamps as though they were inviting stretches of the Austrian countryside.'

Josef Kuwasseg, Leopoldsteinersee, no date

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Another landscape painter featured in Paleoart is Heinrich Harder (1858-1935), who designed the remarkable mosaics for the aquarium at Berlin Zoo which were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943 and then painstakingly restored in 1982.  Examples of his paintings of the German countryside on various auction websites give no indication of the Jugendstil influence in his mosaic designs, with their Hokusai waves and Hodler skies.  The painting of sea lilies below is from a set of collectible cards, 'Animals of the Prehistoric World' (it is atypical as most show examples of megafauna wandering through ancient landscapes).  Several paleoartists have worked on such cards - Harder's were made for a chocolate manufacturer.  When I was growing up we used to get PG Tips tea for the cards, so one of the sources of my own knowledge on dinosaurs was their series Prehistoric Animals (1972). 

Heinrich Harder, Sea Lilies, c. 1920

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Recalling now my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, I would say it was stimulated by a range of sources, from films like The Land That Time Forgot to trips to see the skeletons at the Natural History Museum and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' wonderful old sculptures in Crystal Palace Park (see below).  When it came to paleoart though, my main inspiration was Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles (1960), illustrated by Rudolph Zallinger, an artist best known for The Age of Reptiles, a fresco for the Peabody Museum's Great Hall.  There are scanned images from this book at the blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs (I try not to include in copyright stuff here).  By the 1960s Zallinger was working on a new fresco for the Peabody, completed the year I was born, called The Age of the Mammals.  'In this sixty-foot mural,' Zoë Lescaze writes, 'the pumpkin-orange earth crackles against a brilliant blue sky. Trees run the autumnal gamut with red, green and golden foliage.  The animals, pounce, stalk, scavenge, forage, and flee.'
 

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Iguanadons at Crystal Palace, 1854

My own photograph from a visit in 2008

The Pink and White Terraces

Charles Blomfield, Pink Terraces, 1886

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this month news came in that the lost terraces of Lake Rotomahana had been discovered.  The Pink Terrace (Te Otukapuarangi - 'the fountain of the clouded sky') and the White Terrace (Te Tarata - 'the tattooed rock') were three quarters of a mile apart, each a descending sequence of pools formed by silica in the water that welled up from geothermal springs.  Having first been described by a European traveller in the early 1840s, they become a major tourist attraction for visitors to New Zealand; but in 1886, following an eruption of Mount Tarawera, they disappeared.  Two researchers now think the terraces may lie preserved under mud and ash and are assembling a “team of the willing” to explore the site.  However, in its report The Guardian cautions that another team thought they had found the terraces in 2011, and only last year GNS Science New Zealand concluded that most of them had been destroyed.

 Charles Blomfield, White Terraces, Rotomahana, 1903

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Some photographs were taken of the terraces (see below), but our main idea of what they looked like comes from the paintings of Charles Blomfield (1848-1926).  He began making landscape views in the North Island in the 1870s and the sketches he made of the Pink and White Terraces were source material for paintings long after the landscape had been buried.  Contemporary travel writers felt the inadequacy of words to convey the form and colours of what was before them.  In The Australian Abroad (1879) James Hingston was unequal to the task of describing Te Tarata: 'we had better stop until we get the shade of J. M. W. Turner, that great painter of the mystic, to assist us.'  However, as Lydia Wevers says in Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 'like many travel writers who apostrophise the indescribability of the terraces, Hingston proceeds to describe them for several paragraphs.'

Charles Spencer, Hot Water Cups, White Terrace, 1880

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1877 the prolific travel writer and painter Constance Gordon-Cumming visited Lake Rotomahana (her account can be read in Chapter XXV of At Home in Fiji).  The White Terraces were 'in nature what the Taj Mahal at Agra is in architecture, — a thing indescribable — a fairy city of lace carved in pure marble, — a thousand waterfalls suddenly frozen and fringed with icicles.'  The next day she took in Te Otukapuarangi and 'got a large very careful drawing from the ridge overlooking these terraces, with our tent and the white terraces on the other side of the lake.'  Lydia Wevers criticises the proprietorial birds-eye view Gordon-Cumming adopted in her sketches and the very Victorian attitude of colonial entitlement evident in her writing.  After painting the landscape she got into a dispute over whether a payment should be made to the local Maori (they had been asking £5 for a photograph and thought paintings would warrant a higher fee).

The Pink Terrace, New Zealand 

from Oceana, or England and her Colonies by James Anthony Froude (1886)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Before this unpleasantness over money occurred, Constance Gordon-Cumming had been relaxing in the waters of the Pink Terraces.  You can see from a description like this why people would be motivated to try to find them again, though surely their original magic would be unrecoverable:

'Rock and water are alike smooth and warm and pleasant, and you can prolong the delight of the bath to any extent, passing from one pool to another, sometimes receiving a gentle shower as the sparkling drops trickle from the overhanging rim of a pool, perhaps eight or ten feet above you, or else lying still in passive enjoyment, and watching the changing lights that flit across lake and hill, and all the time the kindly water is coating you with a thin film of that silica which makes the bath so smooth and the bather so silky'

I will conclude here with another description of this experience from perhaps the most famous visitor to the terraces, Anthony Trollope.  He was there in 1873 and remarked on the shell-like appearance of these natural pools, in which 'four or five may sport ... each without feeling the presence of the other.'

'In the bath, when you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch. You press yourself against it, and it is smooth. You lie upon it, and though it is firm, it gives to you. You plunge against the sides, driving the water over your body, but you do not bruise yourself. ... I have never heard of other bathing like this in the world.'

Charles Blomfield, White Terraces, Rotomahana, 1897

Source: Wikimedia Commons