some LANDSCAPES

Talking of William Gilpin (as I was in my previous post), I remember years ago looking in vain for his books in various second hand bookshop...

So how do you describe a landscape?  Normally by selecting the most interesting features to which the reader's attention should be drawn...

In 1772 Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire, saying that she loved gardens in the English style: ‘the curving lines, the gentle slopes, th...

Detail of the south wall, 'Garden Room', Prima Porta Source: Wikimedia Commons In my recent post about Roman landscape painting...

August Strindberg, Coastal Landscape II , 1903 Source: Wikimedia Commons In the midst of all this snow and cold weather I feel in the...

Peter Paul Rubens, Philemon and Baucis , c1630 Source: Wikimedia Commons In 1822 William Hazlitt compared Rubens with Claude: 'I i...

For my last post of the decade I'm going to discuss some words of the writer who provided my nom de blog , 'Plinius'.  In his Na...

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting at the Hayward is a good exhibition, but a depressing experience for any believer in the inspirational p...

Probably too late now to ask for these for Christmas: the new limited edition LPs of Richard Skelton's Landings ... The latest Wire mag...

Almost all you will learn about the poet Wang Bo (called Wang Po in the Wade-Giles system) from the brief stub on Wikipedia is that he was ...

Much has been written this autumn about Van Gogh's letters, following publication of the vast new six-volume collected edition .  Among ...

In what ways can landscape archaeology be considered a form of landscape art?  Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscape (2007) traces the...

The latest New York Review has arrived and it includes a critical article on Jane Campion's film Bright Star by Christopher Ricks.  Th...

I've been in Liverpool this week and managed to squeeze in a trip to the Walker Art Gallery.  I think my favourite painting in their col...

Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten Source: Wikimedia Commons Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten is not, I think it's safe to say, a well known ...

In what conceivable way could Raphael's Sistine Madonna , in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie, be considered a landscape painting?  In 1802,...

The best landscape art book of 2009?  Possibly the new edition of Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape by Joseph Leo Koer...

The Hundred Thousand Places was another purchase at the Small Publishers Fair.  It begins in the morning at the start of a walk, by the...

Today I went to the Small Publishers Fair , an annual event which I based posts on last year and the year before . Among today's purch...

Slavko Vorkapich's contribution to cinema has been described by Philip Kemp in a Film Reference article : 'to today's audiences...