The empty landscapes of the Landes

Théodore Rousseau, Swamp in the Landes, after 1844

I have been so impressed by Kelly Presutti's Land into Landscape that I can't resist one more post on it, highlighting her chapter on 'Wetlands'. Here is a painting she writes about by Théodore Rousseau, the Barbizon painter whose 'ecological' approach to painting entangled trees, untouched by the state's foresters, features in her chapter on 'Forests'.  The Landes, remote from Paris and considered a backward, featureless waste had never attracted landscape painters until Rousseau and Jules Dupré made a trip to the region in 1844. Rousseau's landscape is very different from his dense depictions of Fontainebleau Forest. 

Silvery-white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image without gathering in any defined area. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally across the canvas in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal region. Two-thirds of the canvas is devoted to the sky, but it is a sky that is in intense dialogue with the ground below, picking up on those waterways and creating parallel streams of light and dark above. There are no foreground framing elements; on the contrary, the foreground passes hazily into the middle ground and distance without clear delineation. The scene has regional details, including the scrawny Atlantic pine, a loosely penned-in area with what are likely cattle, and in the far distance what could be sails, as though our gaze might extend to the ocean. It is difficult to measure or grasp the distance covered. The details serve not to establish scale but instead to open up the image outward. Rousseau created an expansive vision, a positive counterpart to the uneasy vastness experienced by earlier travel writers.

Kelly Presutti goes on to discuss late nineteenth century efforts to drain the Landes and cover it with pine trees, a subject covered in Graham Robb's fine 2007 book The Discovery of France. He explains that not a single patch of the original Landes now remains: 

The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. 'The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind', he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory. 

Graham Robb reproduces this photograph with the caption: 'A sombre desert where the cicada sings and the bird is silent, where all human habitation disappears' (V. Hugo). Shepherds in the Landes, at La Mouleyre, near Commensacq, on one of the few surviving patches of the original Landes. The encroaching forest of oak and pine can just be seen on the horizon. A shepherd on stilts could travel at the speed of a trotting horse.

Photographs like this are fascinating but Presutti also reproduces some of Arnaudin's extraordinary landscape views, so minimal they resemble Sugimoto seascapes. He inscribed a horizon line onto his camera lens in order to achieve this consistent framing. Rather than focus on detail like the flowering grasses, or highlight features like buildings or trees, Arnaudin wanted to capture and preserve the landscape's emptiness. In these images and his writing on the Landes he was 'reversing the terms of beauty and ugliness established by earlier commentators' and lauding 'the appeal of the desert, the dream of solitude, and the pleasure of the uninterrupted expanse.'   

A page of Arnaudin photographs from Land into Landscape  by Kelly Presutti

The dew under the blossoms

"Not very festive" was the complaint I received when I attempted to read a few winter poems by Saigyō aloud to the family over Christmas.  Maybe it was the images of solitary life in lonely huts with all mountain trails cut off, or the bamboo bent under snow, frost-withered flowers, wind blowing over dead reeds...  I was trying to interest them in Burton Watson's beautiful translations, published twenty-five years ago by the Columbia University Press.  Saigyō (1118 - 1190) lived through tumultuous times at the end of the Heian dynasty and also through stylistic changes in court poetry which saw greater prominence given to nature description with a sabi aesthetic.  Watson says, in relation to the poem below, 'perhaps he and his fellow poets felt that the very drabness of such scenes, their dim half-light and autumnal sadness, more aptly reflected the age of social decline in which they lived than could any brighter and cheerier landscape.'

心無き身にも哀れは知られけり
     鴫立つ沢の秋の夕暮れ

kokoro naki mi ni mo aware wa shirarekeri shigi tatsu sawa no aki no yūgure

Even a person free of passion

would be moved

to sadness:

autumn evening

in a marsh where snipe fly up.

[Quoted on Wikipedia - the translation is Burton Watson's.]

From the perspective of landscape writing what is most interesting about Saigyō are the poems that are almost pure description and those which record his extensive travels.  The journeys he made in northern Japan were an influence on Basho, as I've mentioned here before, and this ideal of life spent as a wandering Buddhist poet was later taken up by the Beat Movement.  Within half a century of Saigyō's death, local traditions had sprung up around places he apparently visited.  In her autobiography (c. 1313), Lady Nijō mentions being inspired at the age of nine by reading one of his poems, on a mountain stream and scattering cherry blossoms:

'I had envied Saigyō's life ever since, and although I could never endure a life of ascetic hardship, I wished that I could at least renounce this life and wander wherever my feet might lead me, learning to empathise with the dew under the blossoms and to express the resentment of scattering autumn leaves, and make out of this a records of my travels that might live on after my death.'    

This quotation is taken from Gustav Heldt's introduction to his translation of the Saigyo Monogatari (see Monumenta Nipponica, Winter 1997).  This work is a compilation of stories about the poet's life which emphasised his travels around Japan and there are various texts, the earliest dating back to the thirteenth century.  It includes the famous poem I quote above, on snipe rising from a marsh in autumn.  At that point Saigyō has just passed the plain of Togamigahara where 'from out of the drifts of mist covering the field, the wind carried the cries of a deer.'  Afterwards, 'since he had no particular destination in mind, he followed where the moonlight led him...'  At the end of the Saigyo Monogatari, the poet looks back on his life, fifty years spend wandering 'through the provinces, forsaking everything for the frugal life of a monk living in mountains and forests.'  He dies surrounded by cherry blossoms and makes his final journey to the Pure Land.

Reed writing

Sesonji Koreyuki, Wakan rōeishū Anthology, 1160

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

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

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

 Vincent Van Gogh, Marsh with Water Lilies, 1881

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

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

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain

 James Norrie and Jan Griffier II, Panorama of Taymouth Castle and Loch Tay, c. 1733-9

I recently wrote here about Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, focusing on his remarks about Derbyshire.  I mentioned the wealth of illustrations in the Yale Press edition and some of the colour reproductions are spectacular, a full page for example given over to one detail in the painting above, showing soft light on the distant Loch Tay.  It's a shame there aren't more because some of the book's small black and white images are equally remarkable, like Balthasar Nebot's painting of extreme topiary that looks like it has come from the imagination of Giorgio De Chirico.  As these two examples indicate, many of the artists represented in the book came from abroad, particularly the Low Countries: Johannes Kip, Herman Moll, Jan Siberechts, Peter Tillemans.  Other groupings of topographical artists might be made: antiquarians, professional painters and engravers, or artists associated with the military: Paul Sandby, Greenville Collins, John Slezer.  Slezer came over to Scotland from Holland in 1669 but was a supporter of James VII rather than William of Orange and went to prison for it.  Defoe, a great supporter of King William, was writing just after the Act of Union and subsequent uprising by James's son, the Old Pretender.  His observations on Scotland have a particular resonance today.
 

Balthasar Nebot, Garden View of Hatwell House, 1738

Defoe is not generally very expansive on matters of landscape, but here are ten miscellaneous quotes that I thought worth noting.  The final illustration below also appears in the Yale edition and shows the kinds of trading and commercial activities Defoe was really most interested in recording.

1. Essex: the effect of the marshes on the people - 'all along this county it was very frequent to meet with men that had had from five or six, to fourteen or fifteen wives; nay, and some more ... The reason, as a merry fellow told me, who said he had had about a dozen and half of wives, (tho' I found afterwards he fibb'd a little) was this; That they being bred in the marshes themselves, and season'd to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went up into the hilly country, or to speak their own language into the uplands for a wife: That when they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently chang'd their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most; and then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another...'


2.  Harwich: a town paved with petrified clay - 'there is a sort of clay in the cliff, between the town and the beacon-hill adjoining, which when it falls down into the sea, where it is beaten with the waves and the weather, turns gradually into stone: but the chief reason assign'd, is from the water of a certain spring or well, which rising in the said cliff, runs down into the sea among those pieces of clay, and petrifies them as it runs ... The same spring is said to turn wood into iron: But ... I presume, that those who call the harden' d pieces of wood, which they take out of this well by the name of iron, never try'd the quality of it with the fire or hammer; if they had, perhaps they would have given some other account of it.'


3. Bagshot-Heath: a desert in Surrey -  'Those that despise Scotland, and the north part of England, for being full of wast and barren land, may take a view of this part of Surrey, and look upon it as a foil to the beauty of the rest of England ... here is a vast tract of land, some of it within seventeen or eighteen miles of the capital city; which is not only poor, but even quite steril, given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on, not only good for little, but good for nothing; much of it is a sandy desert, and one may frequently be put in mind here of Arabia Deserta, where the winds raise the sands, so as to overwhelm whole caravans of travellers, cattle and people together; for in passing this heath, in a windy day, I was so far in danger of smothering with the clouds of sand, which were raised by the storm, that I cou'd neither keep it out of my mouth, nose or eyes; and when the wind was over, the sand appeared spread over the adjacent fields of the forest some miles distant, so as that it ruins the very soil.'


4. Surrey: the effect of chalk on a traveller - 'From this town of Guilford, the road to Farnham is very remarkable, for it runs along west from Guilford, upon the ridge of a high chalky hill, so narrow that the breadth of the road takes up the breadth of the hill, and the declivity begins on either hand, at the very hedge that bounds the highway, and is very steep, as well as very high; from this hill is a prospect either way, so far that 'tis surprising; and one sees to the north, or N.W. over the great black desart, call'd Bagshot-Heath, mentioned above, one way, and the other way south east into Sussex, almost to the South Downs, and west to an unbounded length, the horizon only restraining the eyes: This hill being all chalk, a traveller feels the effect of it in a hot summer's day, being scorch'd by the reflection of the sun from the chalk, so as to make the heat almost insupportable; and this I speak by my own experience.'


5. London: swallowing up the surrounding villages - 'It is the disaster of London, as to the beauty of its figure, that it is thus stretched out in buildings, just at the pleasure of every builder, or undertaker of buildings, and as the convenience of the people directs, whether for trade, or otherwise; and this has spread the face of it in a most straggling, confus'd manner, out of all shape, uncompact, and unequal ... We see several villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the country, and at a great distance, now joyn'd to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner ... That Westminster is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles's is with Marybone; and Great Russel Street by Montague House, with Tottenham-Court: all this is very evident, and yet all these put together, are still to be called London: Whither will this monstrous city then extend? and where must a circumvallation or communication line of it be placed?'


6. The Fens: the ominous sound of bitterns - 'This part is indeed very properly call'd Holland, for 'tis a flat, level, and often drowned country, like Holland itself; here the very ditches are navigable, and the people pass from town to town in boats, as in Holland: Here we had the uncouth musick of the bittern, a bird formerly counted ominous and presaging, and who, as fame tells us, (but as I believe no body knows) thrusts its bill into a reed, and then gives the dull, heavy groan or sound, like a sigh, which it does so loud, that with a deep base, like the sound of a gun at a great distance, 'tis heard two or three miles, (say the people) but perhaps not quite so far.'


7. Nottingham: its vaults and cellars - 'The town of Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars, and yet so firm as to support the roofs of those cellars two or three under one another; the stairs into which, are all cut out of the solid, tho' crumbling rock; and we must not fail to have it be remember'd that the bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stock'd with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends. as some in our company experienc'd to a degree not fit to be made matter of history.'


8. Yorkshire: magical springs - 'The country people told us a long story here of gipsies which visit them often in a surprising manner. We were strangely amused with their discourses at first, forming our ideas from the word, which, in ordinary import with us, signifies a sort of strolling, fortune-telling, hen-roost-robbing, pocket-picking vagabonds, called by that name. But we were soon made to understand the people, as they understood themselves here, namely, that at some certain seasons, for none knows when it will happen, several streams of water gush out of the earth with great violence, spouting up a huge heighth, being really natural jette d'eaus or fountains; that they make a great noise, and, joining together, form little rivers, and so hasten to the sea. I had not time to examine into the particulars; and as the irruption was not just then to be seen, we could say little to it: That which was most observable to us, was, that the country people have a notion that whenever those gipsies, or, as some call 'em, vipseys, break out, there will certainly ensue either famine or plague.'


9. Dumfries: a fine palace in a hideous landscape - 'We could not pass Dumfries without going out of the way upwards of a day, to see the castle of Drumlanrig, the fine palace of the Duke of Queensberry ... Drumlanrig, like Chatsworth in Darbyshire, is like a fine picture in a dirty grotto, or like an equestrian statue set up in a barn; 'tis environ'd with mountains, and that of the wildest and most hideous aspect in all the south of Scotland; as particularly that of Enterkin, the frightfullest pass, and most dangerous that I met with, between that and Penmenmuir in North Wales; but of that in its place...' 


10. Stirling: the meanders of the River Forth - 'The Governor's lady (who was the Countess Dowager of Marr, when we were there, and mother of the late exil'd Earl of Marr), had a very pretty little flower-garden, upon the body of one of the bastions, or towers of the castle, the ambrusiers, serving for a dwarf-wall round the most part of it; and they walk'd to it from her Ladyship's apartment upon a level, along the castle-wall.  As this little, but very pleasant spot, was on the north side of the castle, we had from thence a most agreeable prospect indeed over the valley and the river; as it is truly beautiful, so it is what the people of Sterling justly boast of, and, indeed seldom forget it, I mean the meanders, or reaches of the River Forth. They are so spacious, and return so near themselves, with so regular and exactly a sweep, that, I think, the like is not to be seen in Britain, if it is in Europe, especially where the river is so large also. The River Sein, indeed, between Paris and Roan, fetches a sweep something like these some miles longer, but then it is but one; whereas here are three double reaches, which make six returns together, and each of them three long Scots miles, or more in length; and as the bows are almost equal for breadth, as the reaches are for length, it makes the figure compleat. It is an admirable sight indeed.' 

Unknown painter, Broad Quay Bristol, early 18th century

Bark of rivers and roof of the wave

Is
Is byþ oferceald, ungemetum slidor,
glisnaþ glæshluttur gimmum gelicust,
flor forste geworuht, fæger ansyne.

These lines come from one of the old rune poems, in which descriptive verses were associated with letters of the runic alphabet.  They refer to the rune Isa, which means 'ice', and can be translated from the Anglo-Saxon as follows

Ice is very cold and immeasurably slippery;
it glistens as clear as glass and most like to gems;
it is a floor wrought by the frost, fair to look upon.

That second line is nice but it does sound better in alliterative Old English: "glisnaþ glæshluttur gimmum gelicust..."  Two other rune poems have survived, in Norwegian and Icelandic, and here are their descriptions of this same ice rune:

Isa
Ice we call the broad bridge;
the blind man must be led.

Ice
Bark of rivers
and roof of the wave
and destruction of the doomed.

These imagistic definitions of natural phenomena can be seen as an early form of nature poetry.  Here are three more examples from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem, which dates from the 8th/9th century and is preserved in a copy made in 1705 (the original manuscript perished in a fire in 1731).  The first, for the rune called Berkana, describes a poplar, although it is given as a birch in the other two rune poems.  The second, for Eihwaz, praises the yew tree, 'greenest of trees in winter' according to the Norwegian version, and in the Icelandic, source of the bow, speeder of arrows.  In his guide to the runes, Bernard King writes that 'the hunting God Ull built his hall in Ydalir, Yewdale, and the bow was regarded as his sacred weapon'.   The third, for Algiz, describes 'eolh-sedge', a kind of sedge grass which would cut you if you brushed against it.  According to King, this rune 'implies defence and protection, possibly even in the form of an amulet or temple sanctuary, and related words are the Gothic alhs, temple, and the Old English ealgian, to protect. There may also be a relationship here with the mysterious runeword alu. The meaning has also been equated with the elk, mentioned by Caesar as sleeping upright leaning against a tree to elude the hunter more easily, and thus in some measure a symbol of preservation in the face of adversity.'

Beorc
The poplar bears no fruit; yet without seed it brings forth suckers,
for it is generated from its leaves.
Splendid are its branches and gloriously adorned
its lofty crown which reaches to the skies. 

Eoh
The yew is a tree with rough bark,
hard and fast in the earth, supported by its roots,
a guardian of flame and a joy upon an estate.

Eolh
The Eolh-sedge is mostly to be found in a marsh;
it grows in the water and makes a ghastly wound,
covering with blood every warrior who touches it.

Our level pastures

Paul Nash, The Rye Marshes (1932) as a Shell Poster

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A pretty miserable rainy day so we went this afternoon down to the London Museum and on our way popped into the Whitechapel Gallery to have a look at 'East Coast: Damn Braces: Bless Relaxes'.  This is a small assemblage of artworks relating to landscape and the politics of place on the East Coast of England, ranging from the watercolours and sketches of the Norwich School to the activities of artists associated with the Humberside College of Art in Hull during the 1990s.  I was pleased but a bit surprised to see Paul Nash's The Rye Marshes, until I reflected that Rye is at the point where the South Coast starts to bend into the East Coast (and the painting itself is normally in Hull, at the Ferens Art Gallery).  I was reminded a bit of Patrick Keiller's recent exhibition at Tate Britain: works have been selected not for their own sake but to illustrate or hint at historical and contemporary questions of land use and ownership.  A small pencil drawing by Cotman, for example, has been chosen because it shows Kett's Castle (Robert Kett led a rebellion against enclosure in 1549 and was captured, held in the Tower and then hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle).  Cotman also painted a view of Mousehold Heath, in which a small area of the common land can be seen enclosed and ploughed up.

The pleasure in curating an exhibition like this must come in making links across time and different media (as I often try to do here).  So, opposite the Cotman are two paintings by Peter De Wint showing the Lincolnshire Wolds at the time of the early nineteenth century enclosures.  Printed next to them on the wall is a poem by that great champion of the commons, John Clare, praising De Wint for his unassuming subject matter: 'No rocks, nor mountains, as the rich sublime, / Hath made thee famous; but the sunny truth / Of Nature, that doth mark thee for all time, / Found on our level pastures: spots, forsooth, /Where common skill sees nothing deemed divine.'  In a case in front of the De Wints is the notebook of another poet, Alfred Tennyson, opened to the lines of 'In Memoriam' in which he writes of finding 'no place that does not breathe / Some gracious memory of my friend ... No gray old grange, or lonely fold, / Or low morass and whispering reed, / Or simple stile from mead to mead, / Or sheepwalk up the windy wold.'  The landscape here again is Lincolnshire, where Tennyson grew up and later spent time with Arthur Hallam, and where, in 1833, he received the letter telling him that his friend had died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 22.

Romney Marsh

In October 1899 a new journal appeared in Germany called Die Insel, 'The Island' and carried four poems by an interesting new writer, Robert Walser (I discussed Walser's poetry here last year).  The magazine only lasted two years but gave rise to a publishing company, Insel-Verlag.  In 1912 they launched a series of distinctively designed short books with Rilke's The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke.  Over time this Island Library series evolved and diversified, introducing marble paper covers, for example, in 1927 (above).  It was these books that inspired the King Penguins which were published over a twenty year period from 1939, eventually comprising 76 volumes.  The first one was on the subject of British birds and many of them focused on aspects of nature or art: roses, shells, mosses, moths, fungi (one volume on the edible kind, another on the poisonous), Egyptian paintings, Greek terracotta, Dürer woodcuts, the medieval carvings of Exeter cathedral and so on.  A few were rather quirky topographical studies: A Prospect of Wales (1948) with text by Gwyn Jones and illustrations by Kenneth Rowntree, The Isle of Wight by Barbara Jones (1950 - one illustration depicted a topiary boat), and Romney Marsh (1950), illustrated and described by John Piper.

Romney Marsh begins by quoting four ‘Earlier Views’: an 1879 address by the Bishop of Dover to the Kent Archaeological  Society, an extract from George Clinch’s Memorials of Old Kent (1907), another from Basil Champneys' A Quiet Corner of England (1875) and this, from an autobiographical article written by Paul Nash c. 1940:

‘I have stayed at Romney Marsh and have watched the eastern sky darken across the dyked flats to Dymchurch and the Channel towards the French coast as the sun sat at my back, and have noticed the strange unity of sea, sky and earth that grows unnoticed at this time and place.’

There is nothing quite as poetic as this in Piper's book, but there are occasional reminders that the author is a painter (‘water lies in light-coloured snatches and loops that reflect a winter sky'...) Mainly however he combines visual description with factual information: 'in winter the reeds still blow in the dykes, showing a pale-yellow flank of close stalks with feathery crowns of grey or purple-black fronds, and there are pea-stacks, built on a tripod of sticks for aeration, as well as the many dyke-side potato and swede clamps.’  The main text is followed by some 'Notes on the Churches of the Marsh and the Cliff' (St Mary Marsh church is said to resemble 'a rural Norfolk church as drawn by Cotman.')  But all this is a prelude to the book's sixteen colour prints, showing a sequence of churches and landscapes (I say 'colour', but they are almost all done in an austerity palette of grey, browns and camouflage green).  You can see a few of them along with Piper's preparatory sketches in the video I have embedded below.  At one point its narrator, admiring the interior of Old Romney church, which Piper painted and described, is apparently caught by surprise when Sir Donald Sinden suddenly appears from behind a curtain, with a copy of the King Penguin in his pocket.  "You've got one of these haven't you?" he says. "I have indeed, wonderful!" she replies.

The Back Bay Fens

Frederick Law Olmsted, Plan for the Back Bay Fens, 1887

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Within the essays and conversation that make up Landscape Theory (see my previous post), there are many interesting comments that could serve as the basis for posts here, but I'll just pick one example for now.  In the course of the seminar Anne Whiston Spirn observed that we no longer perceive some works of landscape art as having been designed and constructed.  Frederick Law Olmsted's plan for the Back Bay Fens, for instance, was 'the first attempt, so far as I know, to construct a wetland.  Olmsted proposed the Fens as a combination of utility and beauty, a restoration of polluted tidal marsh flats to serve human needs.  The power of that restoration wasn't lost on people in Boston at the time, but within a generation people forgot that it was constructed.'  So, Spirn asked, 'how did Olmsted move from the pastoral, pictorial style he had used in Central Park, to the idea of reconstructing a marsh?  Well, Martin Johnson Heade had been painting coastal marshes north of Boston.  Perhaps his paintings influenced Olmsted.  Certainly they must have contributed to public acceptance of Olmsted's revolutionary proposal.'  

Martin Johnson Heade, Marsh with a Hunter, 1874

Passievaart, a huge marsh

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

Vincent van Gogh, A Marsh, 1881

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

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

The trenchéd waters run from sky to sky

The latest New York Review has arrived and it includes a critical article on Jane Campion's film Bright Star by Christopher Ricks.  The problem with the film for Ricks is that it tries to illustrate Keats's poems - he sees this as ridiculous and as unnecessary as adding perfume or sound effects.  Keats's imagination and his words alone are able to create the most vivid imagery.  To assist his argument Ricks quotes some lines about Tennyson which I thought worth recording here (from William Allingham's diary):

"As to visualising," he said, "I often see the most magnificent landscapes."
"In dreams?"
"Yes, and on closing my eyes. To-day when I lay down I saw a line of huge wonderful cliffs rising out of a great sweep of forest — finer than anything in nature."
Other gifts he has, but T. is especially and pre-eminently a landscape-painter in words, a colourist, rich, full and subtle.

I'll end this post with some poetry by Tennyson; the lines below are praised in the final chapter of Francis Turner Palgrave's Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson: With Many Illustrative Examples (1897). Palgrave says of "the trenchéd waters run from sky to sky" that it illustrates Tennyson's ability to fix a scene, "characteristic of the Lincolnshire Marshland, in a few perfect words." So there's clearly no need here for any accompanying footage to help us visualise the landscape...

Whether the high field on the bushless pike,
Or even a sand-built ridge
Of heapéd hills that mound the sea,
Overblown with murmurs harsh,
Or even a lowly cottage whence we see
Stretch'd wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
Where from the frequent bridge,
Like emblems of infinity,
The trenchéd waters run from sky to sky...

Marsh Ritual

Looking at some of Cildo Meireles' Arte Física (Physical Art) from 1969-70 at Tate Modern on Saturday I was reminded of the early manifestations of land art being made then in the USA. For example (to quote from the Tate magazine's interview with Meireles) there was his 'Cordões/30km de Linha Estendidos (Cords/30km Extended line), 1969, which involved laying string along 30 kilometres of beach front and then collecting what was left of it'. It's a reminder (if one were needed) that this kind of conceptual engagement with landscape was going on all over the world - in this case, Brazil.

A couple of years ago the Tate published an introduction to land art written by Ben Tufnell (who curated the Hamish Fulton exhibition there in 2002). It 'attempts to redress a historical imbalance in previous accounts, whereby American artists, particularly those working with earthworks are prioritised over Europeans whose work is perhaps small-scale or ephemeral.' Thus the opening chapter is on Richard Long, with Robert Smithson relegated to chapter 2. However, reading about them in this order really serves to emphasise how full of fertile ideas Smithson was. Long has largely lets his minimal work speak for itself, although Tufnell quotes Long's objection to 'so-called American land art' with its need for large tracts of real estate and earth moving machinery.

Ironically, the perception that it is European artists who create 'small-scale or ephemeral' land art, along with the fame of Andy Goldsworthy, may have obscured the contribution of North American's working in this quieter vein. Ben Tufnell mentions Patrick Dougherty, Roy Staab and Michael Singer. Works by Singer, 'such as the Marsh Ritual Series 1973, Long Island, and the Glades Ritual Series 1975, Everglades National Park, Florida, were composed of sculptural constructions spread across large areas of landscape, each barely visible but gradually revealed, through the ongoing engagement of the viewer, as part of a complex whole.'

Non-Western land art is largely beyond the scope of Ben Tufnell's survey, but he does say that Andy Goldsworthy has inspired a kind of school of land art in Japan, citing the works included in the Hakone Open-Air museum's 30th anniversary exhibition 'Forms in Nature.' Among the artists who exhibited were Masafumi Maita, Takamasa Kuniyasu (see below) and Toshikatsu Endo (whose Epitaph can be seen at Flakstad in Norway). If anyone knows more about the ways in which these Japanese artists see Goldsworthy as an influence, please feel free to leave a comment...

Takamasa Kuniyasu, Spiral of Töölönlahti Bay
Source: tietoukka

Suo (The Marsh)

Einojuhani Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for birds and orchestra (1972) opens with a movement entitled Suo (The Marsh), in which solo flutes are joined by the recorded sound of marsh birds. You might think this would create a rather Japanese-sounding landscape, austere as the Arctic, but instead the flutes flutter up and down playfully and the orchestration becomes quite joyful. This is not surprising because Cantus Arcticus was commissioned for a celebratory occasion: the degree ceremony of the 'Arctic' University of Oulu. The second movement Melankolia starts more bleakly, with Rautavaara using the sound of the shore lark but "brought down by two octaves to make it a 'ghost bird'". Nevertheless this movement too is quite Romantic (a bit too lush for my taste at times) and the last movement, Joutsenet muuttavat (Swans migrating) matches the recorded sound of the swans with a crescendo of rousing strings and brass. And yet, at the end, the whole thing dies away into silence, as "the sound is lost in the distance".

Lake Superior

Lorine Niedecker’s poetry might be thought too spare, too minimal to give a true sense of landscape. And yet, as Charles Tomlinson has written, ‘the space of an environment, sparse in detail and mocking the trite inadequacy of the names that American locations so often bear, stands at the back of Miss Niedecker’s terse formulations – they are fragments shorn against long winters, spring floods and literary isolation.’ In a 1961 essay Jonathan Williams described her house at Black Hawk Island and observed that ‘the river is a major fact in her life – lying there sparkling and running, often flooding and worrying people. It’s in the poems.’ Niedecker herself said, ‘the Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes.’

In fact Niedecker did write longer poems that convey the watery expanses of Wisconsin. ‘Paean to Place’, for example, where we read of her father sculling through marsh fog and her mother helping him with the nets. Then there is ‘Lake Superior’, in which fragmentary facts and quotations mingle with elements of the landscape: granite, iron-ore, blue ice, birch bark and water. And there is her poem ‘My Life by Water’, which can be read here. 

A slightly muffled but engrossing recording of Niedecker from November 1970 can be heard here. In it she reads from her last collection Harpsichord & Salt Fish. There is a real poignancy in hearing her reading these poems a month before she died, at the age of 67, on the last day of the year.