some LANDSCAPES

The building work I mentioned a fortnight ago is well underway, covering everything in layers of dirt from crumbling Victorian bricks so tha...

  Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island , 1867 Yesterday I watched the first of Andrew Graham-Dixon's new three-part series on Scandin...

Francesco Gonin, View of Lake Como , 1840  (illustration for chapter 1 of Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi )    'Tha...

Nicholas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun , 1658 I write this surrounded by piles of books with a couple of pictures p...

I have often written here about music inspired by landscape, but the Song of the Forests is an oratorio dedicated to the reshaping of l...

Reading the new translations of Walter Benjamin's radio broadcasts, made between 1929 and 1932, you are aware of how quickly the wor...

 Ambrosius Holbein, The Island of Utopia , 1516 2016 marks the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia.  The book has li...

Ian Nairn once described the view from 'decent quiet Duquesne Heights onto the roaring heart of Pittsburgh' as the epitome of terrib...

Joseph Wright of Derby, Antigonus in the Storm , 1790-2 On Tuesday we went to see The Winter's Tale at the atmospheric, candlelit...

In an earlier post , 'Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers', I discussed landscape imagery in Song dynasty music for the qin (Wade...

The Regional Book by David Matless was reviewed back in October by Ken Worpole on his New English Landscape blog.  He summarises it as ...

   Francis Towne, A Ruin on the Road to the Ponte Nomentana , 1780   Yesterday I visited the British Museum for Light, time, legacy: Fr...

A while back on Caught by the River Rob St John reviewed Allan Burns' anthology Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in Englis...

Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio , 1855 I have been reading the new anthology of John Berger's art writing, Portraits .  ...

Pierre-Antoine Demachy, The Festival of the Supreme Being , 1794 On 8 June 1794 (20 Prairial Year II) an artificial landscape was erec...

'The innkeeper had lent him an old Kyoto tea-kettle, skilfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from it came the sound of...

A friend in Japan normally posts photographs of deep snow around now, although not this year.  Interestingly, heavy snow does not appear in ...

I have just finished reading aloud to my son The Wind in the Willows .  It was an unabridged edition, so we have been enjoying those chap...