some LANDSCAPES

Conrad Martens, HMS Beagle being hailed by native Fuegians, 1832 Following a visit to Charles Darwin's home Down House earlier this year...

This is 'Barbara Codonia', a depiction of the 'landscape' of northern Germany drawn by Dürer or his school, incorporating th...

Marc Chagall, sketch of a curtain for The Firebird Act 1, 'The Enchanted Forest', 1945 We were in Nice last week and visited the Cha...

Mountains in the Classical Tradition was a research project based at St. Andrews University from 2017 to 2023. It incorporated a blog which...

Detail from The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening The Courtauld exhibition  Seurat and the Sea   is well worth getting to - not cheap, but o...

In April 2018 I wrote a blog post  here  about blossom viewing: 'last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom. It pr...

Sean Scully, Aran , 2005 Sean Scully was the subject of a profile in the Guardian earlier this year with a clickbaity headline: ''I...

Today I paid a second visit to the Tate's Turner & Constable exhibition. The Guardian  paraphrased Adrian Searle's  review  as ...

A place with a pond , in the fifth month when the rains are falling, is a very moving thing. It's deeply affecting to sit for hours on e...

I just finished reading this wonderfully depressing novel by Jon Fosse. It is about the Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830-190...

Utagawa Hiroshige, Listening to Insects at  D ō kan  Hill ,  from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital,  1835-1845  This is one o...

  At the Small Publishers Fair last year I caught a reading by John Bevis from  A Surrey Naturalist , his new collection of eighty found poe...

  Lucy Raven, Deposition, Dam Breach, 16, 2024 This picture, which I saw yesterday at the Lisson Gallery in London, appears to show a mount...

This is a photograph I took on Boxing Day of Mounts Pond on Blackheath. The small mound with trees behind it is now called Whitfield Mount a...

I recently read this lovely new book about the glacier pictures of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. I've written about these before: the 1949 tr...

Richard Long, Ten Days Walking and Sleeping on Natural Ground (1986) - one of three screenprints.  Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of thi...

Just a brief post this time, which I suspect is of mainly personal interest... Last week my wife was presenting at a human rights law meetin...

I was curious to see the White Cube's Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition but conflicted after the recent controversy surrounding his firework per...