some LANDSCAPES

The poetry of the Scottish bard Ossian is often described in terms of its admirers: Diderot, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Wordsworth,...

Ōtagaki Rengetsu, Autumn Moon , 1870 Source: Wikimedia Commons I've been very busy this week, but I just have time for a short po...

Regrettably I don't normally have time to read the London Review of Books although the 6th October issue was a good one - Kathleen...

 Philippe-Jacques van Brée, Laura and Petrarch at Fountaine-de-Vaucluse , 1816 Source: Wikimedia Commons In 1337, a year after his as...

Ten years ago, in an early post here , I mentioned the mysterious Ink Wang and other ‘late T’ang eccentrics’, distant prototypes of the New ...

Lu Hong, View 1 of Ten Views from a Thatched Hut (copy of 8th century original) Source: Wikimedia Commons When we look at Chinese la...

Musō Soseki (1275-1351) designed two of the great landscape gardens in Kyoto, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, neither of which I manag...

'There are few sights in England that can quite equal the absurd charm of the imitation Khyber Pass in Hull's East Park.  This sl...

There are just a couple more weeks to see George Shaw: My Back to Nature at the National Gallery.  The title comes from Shaw's observat...

I was thinking, walking home this evening, that the season of mists is upon us again here in London.  Then, later, I found myself reading ab...

Félix Vallotton, illustration for Paul Scheerbart's Rakkóx the Billionaire , 1901 In this picture Kasimir Stummel, a young man empl...

I only recently got round to reading Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies and can highly recommend it...

Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt, 1806 Images: Wikimedia Commons Andrea Wulf has just won another prize for The Inven...

Robert Macfarlane recently chose Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez as 'the book that changed my life'.  He says 'it struck me with ...

We saw this tall clock a few weeks ago in Stockholm's Royal Palace.  It dates from the 1760s when ideal landscapes were painted onto al...

In ' The Eeriness of the English Landscape ' Robert Macfarlane wrote about a growing interest in landscape and the uncanny, with rec...

'As soon as I saw it, that was my country.  I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted me exactly.  It's something th...

This month we spent a week in and around Stockholm.  I took the photograph here from a boat, although we actually spent most of our time ...

'My ties with Fårö have several origins.  The first was intuitive. This is your landscape, Bergman.  It corresponds to your internal im...

I don't think I've ever embedded a Ted Talk before.  This one covers some of the key points Bernie Krause makes in his recent bo...