some LANDSCAPES

Painting en plein air can bring many unexpected problems, from the bandits encountered by Thomas Jones to the waves that drenched Claude ...

In these days of forced isolation, lots of people are turning to film streaming sites.  If you are interested in silent movies, I can hig...

One of the many pleasures of Vincent van Gogh's paintings is the way he changes his style of painting at different places i...

Unknown artist, Jade Mountain Illustrating  the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion , 1790 Source: Wikimedia Commons Th...

Because this blog focuses on the arts, I have rarely mentioned books by geographers, although it goes without saying that they often write b...

Netherlandish Master, after Jacques Callot,  The Mock Battle Between the Weavers' and Dyers' Guilds on the Arno in Florence...

In July 1942, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Tullio Crali published in Rome a Futurist Manifesto entitled 'Plastic Illusionism of War...

Marutam, Queen's Flower, Lagerstroemia speciosa   Source: Mokkie   In the afterword to A. K. Ramanujan's celebrated antholo...

This is a detail from one of the colour Polaroid photographs taken by Wim Wenders in 1974, when he was working on The Wrong Move .  Thes...

  The Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom by Sung Po-jen is the world’s earliest-known printed art book, published in 1238.  Only one cop...

   Pieter Stevens, Woodland Scenery with Hermits , 1614 This beautiful, atmospheric landscape painting is just 6.9 x 12.8 cm, as yo...

Georg Melchior Kraus, Weimar Römisches Haus , 1799 A building in the Park an der Ilm, based on an idea by Goethe Goethe's novel E...

   Paintings in the Goethe House, Frankfurt I was on something of a Goethe pilgrimage last weekend, with five stops, beginning in his c...

I have been reading the Tang Dynasty poet Wei Yingwu (737-92) in Red Pine's award-winning translation, In Such Hard Times (2009).  A...

Coming to the end of the year, I find myself thinking about this blog.  Whilst I still enjoy writing here, I think I will keep posts short a...

A detail from Hanging Gardens of Rock City (1970) by Liliane Lijn In the British Museum at the moment you can see Hanging Gardens of R...

I was at the White Cube on Sunday to see the latest batch of Anselm Kiefer paintings, Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot .  I...