some LANDSCAPES

My favourite parts of Václav Cílek's To Breathe With Birds (2015) are those descriptions of sites in Bohemia that lead off into spe...

... it seems to me that I had a dream And in that dream I am suddenly woken up by the fracas of deafening explosions. I open my ...

Harald Sohlberg, Flower Meadow in the North , 1905 Images: Wikimedia Commons The Dulwich Picture Gallery have done it again with an...

When Beethoven premiered his Pastoral Symphony in Vienna on December 22, 1808, he wrote that it should be considered "more an expre...

This image of a mystic alone in the mountains recalls the Himalayan paintings of Nicholas Roerich that I discussed in my previous post . ...

'The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the l...

Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems (2011) is an introduction to a form of poetry that can be read in different directions.  ...

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...

I was very tempted this week to go to Cafe Oto for Brunhild Ferrari in conversation with David Grubbs, but it was on 14 February and I di...

Watercolour World is a new online database of documentary watercolours painted before 1900 which launched at the end of January.  You can u...

Richard Wilson, The Temple of Clitumnus,  with the cows drinking from the spring of Clitumnus,  near Spoleto, Umbria (detail), 18th ...

The Great Polish Map of Scotland Source: Wikimedia Commons (John Riddell) I have written here before about relief maps, focusing on...

I am returning here to a subject I covered over ten years ago, the gardens of the kings of Assyria, because I have been to see the Britis...

Salomon Gessner, Bucolic Scene , 1767 My post yesterday was about a nineteenth century French-speaking Swiss writer from Geneva; thi...

'Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.' -  Henri-Frédéric Amiel This is one of those quotes about landscape you come acros...

'A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.  In a way, they're words in front of the old Paramount...

I thought it was time to bring back my regular surveys of 'landscape music', having had a couple of years off.  The last one I did ...