The Cloud

The exhibition A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910 looks interesting but is not coming to Britain. One of the artists included is Prince Eugen of Sweden, a royal landscape painter who bought and promoted the work of the Impressionists. His work is influenced by Impressionism but tends to have a symbolist quality, as in The Cloud (1896). As it says on the exhibition website, ‘The intensity of the colour, the path into the unknown and the cloud in the distance, together with the absolute stillness, can all be interpreted as symbols of a longing for the life to come.’ A sense of Prince Eugen’s range can be obtained from the Waldemarsudde website, including an earlier version of The Cloud (1895). The 1890s must have been the last time a landscape-painting prince could be at the cutting edge of art…

Prince Eugen, A Summer Night at Tyresö, 1895

Postscript 2016

I have now visited Prince Eugen's villa in Stockholm - it lives up to the description in the comment below.  Here's a photograph of the interior, showing landscape paintings on the wall and the view from a window.  The other photograph below is one of the Prince's cloud paintings hanging on the wall.  The accompanying text includes this quote: "What actually interests me are clouds, the huge white and yellow kind that swim around and balloon in the sky."

Lit dew shimmers

Poet and Chinese scholar David Hinton has specialised in translations from the Chinese rivers-and-mountains tradition. He has been well served by publishers – the books are beautifully produced, as can be seen on the David Hinton website. As I write this I am looking at the Archipelago Books edition of The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, printed on “60lb Mohawk Vellum” paper, with its imagistic poems spaced elegantly on each page.

The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan is the first English book devoted completely to the High T’ang poet Meng Hao-jan (689-740). The introduction quotes poems by Li Po and Wang Wei to give a sense of how these better known poets revered Meng, and a later poem by Po Chü-i in which ‘Meng himself disappears into landscape while his poems survive as landscape’. Rather than become a bureaucrat or monk, Meng lived a simple life in the mountains of Hsiang-yang. His surviving body of work is not large; ‘it is said that Meng’s practice was to destroy poems after writing them because they inevitably failed to render experience at that absolute level that lies beyond words.’

There are a few sample poems on Hinton’s site which demonstrate the way Meng rendered experience: “My thatch hut grows still. At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers.” In one of these poems, Meng climbs Long-View Mountain to survey the landscape, clouded in mists and blossoms. In another, Meng writes from his ‘bamboo-leaf gardens’ to Ch'ao, the ‘Palace Reviser’ – while Ch’ao toils in the library, Meng lives close to nature, where words start to be forgotten.

Earthrise

There is currently a trend for uncovering documentary photographs and considering them in the context of landscape art practices and conventions - a recent example is the book Record Pictures: Photographs from the Archives of the Institution of Civil Engineers by Michael Collins. Perhaps the most spectacular set of documentary photographs recovered in this way is Michael Lite’s reprints from the NASA archive. His Full Moon site has some of these images.

Most of the best lunar landscapes were photographed from orbiting spacecraft, e.g. a view of Rima Ariadaeus, a terraced wall crater, and a lunar rille, all photographed by the Apollo 10 astronauts in May of 1969. The best known lunar landscape is one in which the moon is merely the frame: Earthrise (above) photographed by William A. Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 from Apollo 8. For the story of how the photograph came to be taken, see the account by Robert Zimmerman. The ABC site has the black and white image by Apollo 8’s commander Frank Borman, and the famous colour image rotated to the orientation Anders originally saw through the viewfinder.

Is there a danger in aestheticising these photographs? Landscape often gives rise to questions about the overlap between scientific observation and art. The status of these Apollo photographs might be likened to the paintings of John Russell (1745-1806), who made meticulous studies of the moon’s surface using a telescope, like this one.

Scottish streams

John Millais, Portrait of John Ruskin, 1853-4

In this memorable passage, John Ruskin observes the acoustic qualities of Scottish streams:

'I know no other waters to be compared with them; - such streams can only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English Yorkshire shales and limestones merely form – carpenter-like – tables and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and villages – (the difference between ford and bridge curiously – if one may let one’s fancy loose for a moment – characterizing the difference between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics, in our two great universities); but the pure crystal of the Scottish pebbles, giving the stream is gradations of amber to the edge, and the sound as of ‘ravishing division to the lute,’ make the Scottish fords the happiest pieces of all one’s day walk.'

From Fors Clavigera, Letter XXXII, August 1873, Section 14

Vague snow descending

A John Clare poem gives its title to a new anthology of ‘poems for the planet’, The Thunder Mutters, edited by Alice Oswald, author of Dart. Clare’s biographer Jonathan Bate has reviewed it in The Guardian. Clare is also represented among Oswald’s 101 choices by a transcription of a nightingale song and a prose description of a woodman working in a winter forest. These examples convey her aim in the anthology to highlight poems that enter directly into the natural world through close observation or labour (Oswald herself worked as a gardener). As she says in the introduction, “no prospect, pastorals or nostalgic poems are in here…” So in a way this is an anthology about poets in the landscape rather than ‘landscape poems’.

Nevertheless, one poem in The Thunder Mutters is simply called ‘Landscape’. The poem didn’t have this title in French (frustratingly there is no information about any of the poems apart from some incomplete acknowledgements, so it is unclear to the reader when or in what form this poem, or others like ‘The Thunder Matters’, were first written or published). ‘Landscape’ is a translation by C.F. Macintyre of Paul Verlaine’s ‘Dans l’interminable ennui de la plaine’ (1874). This poem concerns neither nature nor outdoor work - it is a landscape of the mind, a ‘flat land’ with ‘vague snow descending’ and woods where misty grey oaks twist like clouds:

Dans l'interminable
Ennui de la plaine
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
Le ciel est de cuivre
Sans lueur aucune
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.

Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées…

Alice Oswald places this ‘Landscape’ opposite ‘Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues’ by blues singer Charlie Patton, which gives an indication of the anthology’s range. It is a strength of the book that her selections are quirky and personal – she includes a poem by her husband and local epitaphs from Bideford and Great Torrington churches. The combination of famous poems by writers like Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman interspersed with fragments of oral and experimental poetry make The Thunder Mutters a very enjoyable collection.

Swordy Well

There is a good John Clare blog which combine extracts from the poems and prose with appropriate images. Some recent posts have been on Clare’s poem ‘The Lament for Swordy Well’ – site of a quarry near Clare’s home which has recently been saved from developers by the Langdyke Trust.

Swordy Well is one of Clare’s special places… it seems inappropriate to use the term ‘landscape’ in connection with poetry so immersed in its subject. In Edwin Paxton Hood’s book The Literature of Labour, published in 1851 when Clare was still living in the Northampton Asylum, it is noted that ‘other poets select a river, or a mountain, and individualise it, but to Clare all are but parts of the same lovely Home, and as every part of the home is endeared – the chair, the shelf, the lattice, the wreathing flower, the fire-place, the table – so is every object in Nature a beloved object, because the whole is beloved.’

One telling example of the way Clare goes beyond other poets in his relationship with the natural world is provided by R. K .R. Thornton, in his introduction to a short anthology of Clare’s verse published by Everyman (1997). Clare is ‘the only poet I know of who would be able to describe the changes in trees not by descriptions of the leaves, not by accounts of the blossom or berries, but by describing changes in the bark.’ Thornton cites as an example ‘Pleasures of Spring’ in which Clare describes the bark of blackthorn darkening, hazels shoots regaining bright freckles and ‘foulroyce’ (dogwood) twigs shining red as ‘stockdoves’ claws.’

Small woods, and here and there a voide place

The OED is allowing free access to its online edition this week. Here are four definitions of the word ‘landscape’ along with some illustrative quotations from the seventeenth century.

• A picture representing natural inland scenery, as distinguished from a sea picture, a portrait, etc: 1605 Ben Jonson in The Masque of Blackness, “First, for the Scene, was drawne a Landtschap, consisting of small woods...”

• The background of scenery in a portrait or figure-painting (obsolete): 1656 Thomas Blount in Glossographia, “All that which in a Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or by-work.”

• A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view; a piece of country scenery: 1632 John Milton in L’Allegro, “Streit mine eye has caught new pleasures Whilst the Lantskip round it measures.”

• In a generalized sense, inland natural scenery, or its representation in painting: 1606 Thomas Dekker in The seuen deadly sinnes of London, “A Drollerie (or Dutch peece of Lantskop).”
  

The first of these references, The Masque of Blackness, was Ben Jonson’s first masque, performed for Queen Anne at Whitehall Palace on 6 January 1606. It is usually discussed in relation to issues of race and gender, but the artificial landscape scenery is interesting as it was part of an early Inigo Jones design. Here is the full description from which the OED's quotation above is taken:

First, for the Scene, was drawne a Landtschape, consisting of small woods, and here and there a voide place filld with huntings; which falling, an artificiall Sea was seene to shoote forth, as if it flowed to the land, raised with waues, which seemed to moue, and in some places the billow to breake, as imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature.

Mountains and clouds, reflected

Charles Tomlinson, a poet who has always drawn inspiration from landscapes and landscape painting, once wrote a review (Modern Painters Spring 1989) in which he described his discovery of Cézanne through books. This intellectual journey began during the war, when it was not possible to view any actual paintings, with a tiny black and white illustration of a view of Gardanne in Eric Newton’s European Painting and Sculpture. However, the first significant book was Adrian Stokes’ Cézanne, which Tomlinson read in 1948. Stokes likened Cézanne’s treatment of form to ‘trees reflected by slightly undulating water’, a metaphor that Tomlinson links to these lines of Wordsworth (The Prelude Book IV) that, like the paintings, focus our attention on the process of perception itself:

As one who hangs down-bending from the side
Of a slow-moving boat, upon the breast
Of a still water, solacing himself
With such discoveries as his eye can make
Beneath him in the bottom of the deep,
Sees many beauteous sights--weeds, fishes, flowers,
Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more,
Yet often is perplexed, and cannot part
The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,
Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth
Of the clear flood, from things which there abide
In their true dwelling…

Who else did Tomlinson go on to read? Merleau-Ponty’s 1948 essay Le Doute de Cézanne is described quite rightly as a ‘wonderful fifteen pages’. Tomlinson was also stimulated by the discussion of Cézanne’s painting The Abandoned House in André Breton’s L’Amour Fou. Then there were the writings of William Rubin (‘Cézanne and the beginnings of Cubism’, 1977), Theodore Reff (‘Painting and Theory in the Final Decade’, 1978) and Meyer Shapiro (various books). However, Tomlinson ends the review recommending the ‘necessary’ book, Cézanne: A Biography by John Rewald.

A postscript to this list was a letter Tomlinson wrote in the next issue explaining that he regretted having had to exclude Kurt Badt’s ‘remarkable’ The Art of Cézanne (1965), as well as D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Introduction to these Paintings’ (1929), Rilke’s letters on Cézanne and Charles Biederman’s The New Cézanne (1958)… So, to summarise, here were Tomlinson’s favourite Cézanne writers, 17 years ago: Stokes, Merleau-Ponty, Breton, Rubin, Reff, Shapiro, Rewald, Badt, Lawrence, Rilke and Biederman.

Tomlinson mentions the Modern Painters piece on Cézanne in a 1991 interview with David Morley in The North. For more on Tomlinson see The Charles Tomlinson Resource Centre. His new book Cracks in the Universe appears next month.

The Wall, Dymchurch

On the centenary of the birth of Paul Nash (1889-1946) there was an exhibition of his art called 'Paul Nash: Places' which focused on seven key landscapes in his career. These landscapes were: Iver Heath, where his family bought a house in 1900; The Wittenham Clumps, strange chalk hills with a group of beech trees at the summit; The Chilterns, where Nash lived immediately after the First World War; the bleak coastal landscape of Dymchurch; Avebury with its prehistoric stones; Monster Field in Gloucestershire, a site where Nash drew and photographed surreal tree forms; and Boar's Hill near Oxford, home of Nash's friend Hilda Harrisson, where he stayed in the early 1940s.

Paul Nash, The Wall, Dymchurch, c. 1923

Source: Tate Gallery - public domain (image added 2017)

The paintings, lithographs and wood engravings Nash made at Dymchurch are particularly compelling when seen as a group. They usually centre on the concrete sea wall and are constructed from the flat planes of sea, sand, steps, pathway and sky. Sometimes there are lonely haunted figures, as in Promenade (1922). It is easy to imagine Nash's memories of the War and his struggle to readjust influencing the mood of these landscapes. Before moving to Dymchurch Nash had never really liked the sea. Indeed in writing about his early life he recalled that his parents had not only failed to encourage his artistic career but had suggested he join the Navy: "I cannot blame my parents for not dedicating me to art but in offering me to the sea I think they were a little casual." However "in those days I knew nothing of the sea or the magical implication of aerial perspective across miles of shore where waves alternately devour and restore the land" (Nash in Outline; an autobiography and other writings (1949) quoted by Clare Colvin in the Paul Nash: Places (1989) exhibition catalogue). These magical implications were what Nash was seeking to explore in images of Dymchurch like Promenade II (1920) and The Wall, Dymchurch (c 1923).

Paul Nash, Promenade II, 1920

(This is the correct date even though the image is labelled 1923)

Source: Tate Gallery - public domain (image added 2017)

Hole in the ground

Artist and musician Jem Finer, has been awarded the first PRS Foundation £50,000 New Music Award to create a sound art installation with Stour Valley Arts in King's Wood. The PRS Foundation site has this description: "Inspired by suikinkutsu, water chimes found in the temple gardens of Japan, Score for a Hole in the Ground uses tuned percussive instruments, played by falling water, to create music. A root like system of ducts will collect and amplify the sounds, via a brass horn, rising 20 feet above ground level. Finer describes his project as, ‘both music and an integrated part of the landscape and the forces that operate on it and in it.’" There is a video in which Finer talks about the way the piece will interact with its setting, both as sound and sculpture. Score for a Hole in the Ground will depend "on the cycle of the seasons, the weather and the landscape... the whole piece is played by nature."

The origins of suikinkutsu lay in the realisation by Japanese gardeners that vessels buried upside down under the earth to help drain water away made particularly pleasing sounds.  They became popular in the Edo period associated with the chōzubachi (hand wash basin) used in the tea ceremony.   The visitor would first hear a few drops echoing below, a sound known as ryūsuion, as they began to wash their hands.  This would be followed by another sound, suitekion, as more water fell from the basin.  The simple act of hand washing was thus turned into music.  In the twentieth century suikinkutsu fell out of use and in 1959 only two were known to be still in existence, silent and buried under soil.  However, in the last couple of decades there has been a revival and they are now readily available to buy in metal or unglazed pottery.  Their physical appearance is unimportant because they are never seen: the beauty of the suikinkutsu is that it plays unseen and the location of the sound is a kind of mystery.

Jem Finer was previously artist in residence at the Oxford University Astrophysics Department and has made an album called Visionary Landscapes.

Light floating like fog

The English version of Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids is now available in paperback (Thames & Hudson). Andrei Tarkovsky took to using a Polaroid camera in the late seventies and these images of Vermeer-like interiors and landscapes of memory are a distillation of the particular atmosphere that some of us find compelling in his films. The Guardian site has some of these photographs alongside some brief commentary by Andrei Tarkovsky’s son (this commentary would have been welcome in the book – instead there are quotations from the director’s writings).

Instant Light includes an essay by photographer Giovanni Chiaramonte which is available at the excellent Tarkovsky site Nostalghia.com. Chiaramonte draws attention to the way these photographs capture different aspects of the light of Italy and Russia. There is ‘a soft, suffused light floating like the fog over the fields of the immense plain around Myasnoye’, Tarkovsky’s house in the country, ‘low, raking light given off by the grass in the woods’, and ‘evening light reflected, lighter than the sky, in the water along the bank of the Parà River’. For me, the small Polaroid photographs of the Bagno Vignoni, with steam rising from the water in a golden haze, are almost as affecting as the slowly moving images in the film Tarkovsky’s made there, Nostalghia.

Study of sunlight

I’ve just been to the Sir John Soane Museum to see The Tragic Genius of Joseph Michael Gandy. It is a small exhibition (free entry) prompted by a new Brian Lukacher book, Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England. Here are some links to articles about the exhibition: Christopher Woodward, Deyan Sudjic, Kevin Jackson.

Joseph Gandy, cut away perspective drawing of the Bank of England as a ruin, 1830

Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) is probably most famous for being the first European artist to depict contemporary architecture in the form of future ruins, in his paintings of Soane’s designs for the Bank of England. In focusing on Gandy rather than the work of Soane, the exhibition reveals the latter’s qualities (and defects) as a painter in his own right. Perhaps the most interesting quality of his work is the varied use of light to create atmosphere. Soane called the magical light effects in Gandy’s architectural interiors ‘lumière mysterieuse’, and the exteriors often employ soft warm light that flatters Soane’s designs. The exhibition has a few small landscape watercolour sketches, some of which are exercises in light effects. One of them, for example, a Study of sunlight (March 1827) includes a note describing a parhelion: ‘this Phenomenon was an inverted Iris its colour vivid & Pure’.

Crystal-like rain-screens

‘I think the smoky, sooty surfaces of the walls of most London buildings do not bear close examination, but look beautiful behind the crystal-like rain-screens, which give them lustre.’ This is from Chiang Yee’s The Silent Traveller in London (1938), a travel book in which he sees the city with the eyes and sensibility of a Chinese landscape painter. ‘As I walk, the typical drizzle sometimes accompanied by gusts is blown in my face and brings an indescribable feeling…’ Reading this kind of thing almost makes the dismal spring weather acceptable: it’s possible to see beyond the wet wind stinging your face and sapping your energy and appreciate the city as if walking inside a misty watercolour.

It is not just the rain that brings Chiang Yee pleasure. He says ‘I have enjoyed the London fog in many circumstances.’ On one occasion a bemused Londoner tries to assure Chiang that he would be wasting a shilling to look at the view from Westminster Cathedral on a foggy day, but the ‘silent traveller’ makes the ascent anyway. From the top of the tower he looks out on a sea of mist, feeling as if he is in heaven, far away from the street and its traffic. He quotes an anecdote from Lin Yutang’s book The Importance of Living (1937) in which an American lady is taken to the hills of Hangchow to ‘see nothing’. As they climb she asks “what is there?” and is reassured that there are wonderful sights at the top. ‘Finally they reached the summit. All about them was an expanse of mists and fogs, with the outline of distant hills barely visible on the horizon.’

The spring of Khosrow

Looking at images of a carpet at Sacramento Airport by Seyed Alavi, with its design showing satellite views of the Sacremento River, reminded me that one of the most famous of all carpets was made to illustrate a landscape. This was The Spring of Khosrow, a vast silk Persian carpet (84 x 35ft) depicting a royal garden. According to Penelope Hobhouse ( in The History of Gardening), it “used golden threads to represent the earth, shimmering crystal for the rills, and pearls for the gravel paths. Fruit trees in the geometric plots had trunks and branches shaped in silver and gold with precious stones representing flowers and fruit.”  It was also known as The Winter Carpet because it could be used when the weather was too bad to experience real gardens.  Sadly in 637, when the invading Arab army found the carpet at Ctesiphon, they cut it up and divided the pieces among themselves. However, the tradition of depicting gardens on Persian carpets has continued.

The black rocks of Brittany

In The Franklin’s Tale Chaucer describes the sadness of Dorigen as she stands on the high cliffs of Brittany looking out at the ships, thinking about her husband who has left her to win renown in England. The sight of the black rocks reminds her of the dangers of such a journey:

But whan she saugh the reisly rokkes blake,
For verray feere, so wolde hir herte quake
That on hire feet she myghte hir noght sustene.
Thanne wolde she sitte adoun upon the grene,
And pitously into the see biholde…

She cannot understand why God created such a beak, treacherous landscape and concludes

“… wolde God, that alle thise rokkes blake,
Were sonken into helle for his sake!
Thise rokkes sleen myn herte for the feere!”
Thus wolde she seyn, with many a pitous teere.

Hir freendes sawe that it was no disport
To romen by the see, but disconfort,
And shopen for to pleyen somwher elles;
They leden hir by ryveres and by welles,
And eek in othere places delitables.

So she avoids the black rocks in favour of more pleasant places, but she cannot forget them, and when a suitor, Aurelius, declares his love for her, the faithful Dorigen dismisses his attentions with a comment that he would have to destroy the coastal rocks before she could be his. Dorigen is then reunited with her husband, but in the meantime Aurelius has found a magus who can help cast a spell to create the illusion of a changed landscape. Dorigen is horrified when she sees that the rocks have disappeared, but eventually all ends well, with Aurelius accepting that Dorigen truly loves her husband and releasing her from the pledge.

Real and illusionary landscapes of Brittany play a central role in this beautiful story. The image of Dorigen standing on the headland seems to come from the Romantic period, but her attitude to the black rocks reflects a very pre-Romantic distrust of such dangerous landforms, whose very appearance suggests that they would be better “sonken into helle”.

Edward Burne-Jones, Dorigen of Bretagne longing for the safe return of her husband, 1871

Tree Mountain

Greenmuseum is a virtual space for environmental art with a lot of useful material. Among the featured artists is Agnes Denes, who is probably still best known for ploughing two acres of Manhattan with wheat in her 1982 work Wheatfield – A Confrontation (see below). A year later she designed Tree Mountain-Proposal for a Forest, a work that remained conceptual until the Finnish government announced at the 1992 Earth Summit that it would build the mountain. It would include 11,000 trees, planted by volunteers from around the world. Construction was finished in 1996, but of course the work continues to change: the site is legally protected for four hundred years. Each tree is owned by the person who planted it and their descendents, which means that ownership of an art work is also custodianship of nature. Whilst the trees will outlive their current owners and change hands, the forest itself cannot be owned by anyone. Images from the construction of Tree Mountain are available here and there are more recent photographs of the project illustrating a short essay by Agnes Denes, ‘What it Means to Plant a Forest’. 

Postscript 2023: 

This post originally included a single image of Wheatfield but the online link has long since disappeared. In November this year though I saw this set of photographs at the Barbican's Re/Sisters exhibition. As it's possible to take photographs in art museums these days, I am including my phone picture here.

 

Clear breeze and bright moon

The cycle of the seasons is celebrated in The Angler’s Calendar (1651), forty songs by the Korean sijo poet Yun Sondo (1587-1671). The spring section begins in early morning with fog on the stream and sunlight illuminating the black hills. The fisherman delights in the cries of cuckoos and the sight of blue willows on the riverbank and peach blossoms floating on the water. These petals remind him of the Chinese story of the Peach Blossom Spring, far away from earthly cares. This theme of joy and escape is maintained to the end of the poem, where winter’s clouds screen the poet from the world and roaring waves drown out its sounds.

Another evocation of spring in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry is In Praise of Spring by Chong Kugin (1401-1481), translated by Peter H. Lee. Here again, petals on a stream suggest to the poet that he is near the source of the Peach Blossom Spring. He climbs between the pine trees to a hilltop and surveys the landscape of scattered villages, with mist glowing in the sunlight and spring colours covering the fields. Although he is without fame and rank, the poet is happy to have friends in “the clear breeze and bright moon.”

April at the Chateau of Dourdan

In the Limbourg Brothers’ Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, April (above) is symbolised by a newly betrothed couple standing in a green landscape, with the Duc’s chateau of Dourdan dominating the background. March also features a castle, Lusignan, but the foreground is taken up with agricultural work: sowing and ploughing fields. In contrast April seems to convey the delights of spring - full of pleasure and hope for the future. Two maidens are picking flowers. The trees are in full leaf and new blossoms are visible in the orchard.

The miniatures were painted by the Limbourgs in 1413-16 and completed later by Jean Colombe. There are landscape elements in every month, ranging from February’s scene of winter snow to November’s detailed view of ploughing in fields near the Louvre. However the Hours also include many other illustrations of scenes from the Bible and these too display an interest in landscape: for example a plan of Rome, the Annunciation to the Shepherds in the hills near Bethlehem, and an unusual night scene at Gethsemane. Sadly the Limbourgs were not able to paint the Flight into Egypt, always a stimulating subject for landscape painters, and so it was left to Jean Colombe to execute this particular miniature.

Fallen blossom

Spring seems at last to be with us. Here are twenty landscape-related season words (kigo) that are traditionally used in Japanese poetry set during the spring:

hibari - skylarks
kasumi – the springtime haze
kawazu – frogs
kigan – departing geese
ko no me – tree buds
oborozuki – hazy moon
ryuujo – willow fluff
saezuri – the twittering of birds
sakura - cherry blossoms
shirauo - whitbait
shunchoo – spring tide
shundei – spring mud
shunkoo – spring light
shunran – spring orchid
tanemaki – sowing seed
tsumikusa – herb gathering
uguisu - the bush warbler
ume - plum blossom
wasurejimo – last frost
zansetsu – lingering snow

For more kigo see the list of 500 Essential Season Words on the Renku Home site. There is a nice spring haiku by Arakida Moritake (1473-1549) in which he sees a fallen blossom returning to the bough, only to realise it is a butterfly:

rakka eda ni / kaeru to mireba / kocho kana

Splice garden

In Anne Whiston Spirn’s book The Language of Landscape there is an entertaining chapter in which she thinks up landscape equivalents for figures of speech: alliteration, anachronism, cliché, euphemism, litotes, metonym, synecdoche etc. etc. Some are more obvious than others. Looking for the more obscure figures of speech I was interested in her discussion of meiosis. Meiosis is defined here as a “reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature”, and their example, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is the Black Knight’s dismissal of the loss of both his arms in a fight with King Arthur as “just a flesh wound”. In landscape design, Spirn associates this kind of belittling understatement with the work of Martha Schwartz. Schwartz’s playful, conceptual gardens reject the ‘Nature Fantasy’ that underlies traditional landscape design. She aroused fierce criticism when Landscape Architecture Magazine featured her Bagel Garden on its cover in January 1980 and she remains a controversial figure. In a recent article by Tim Richardson in the Telegraph, for example, he says “it is surprising what fury Schwartz's work arouses among some horticulturists - in the past weeks, several contributors to this newspaper have told me they think that Schwartz is a trickster.”

The designs of Martha Schwartz can also be used to illustrate other figures of speech. Spirn discusses her Splice Garden (Cambridge Massachusetts) as an exemplification of paradox, oxymoron and conceit. This rooftop space (the location itself to some extent paradoxical) includes plastic flowers and witty juxtapositions, like a formal French clipped tree encircled by the raked gravel of a Zen garden.

Update 2015: Since writing this a lot more material has become available online and it has become possible to embed video clips in blog posts, so here is a Martha Schwartz lecture from Vimeo..

Utah Beach

It is now fifty years ago that J.G. Ballard published his first short stories. Rereading one of these, ‘Prima Belladonna’, recently I was surprised how much of the story is rooted in the form of fifties British SF, forgetting how much his work and the issues he writes about have changed, even though his preoccupation with surreal landscapes has always been there. Ballard’s vision of Vermillion Sands, the near future desert resort populated by idle dilettantes, first described in ‘Prima Belladonna’ remains pertinent, although perhaps its location would now have shifted to Dubai.

Another constant in Ballard’s work is his interest in landscapes transformed by military technology. In The Guardian last week, he was describing the strange Modernist structures of Utah Beach, which resemble those blockhouses of a nuclear testing site that feature in his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964). Ballard implies in his article that few tourists visit Utah Beach, although surely it is only a matter of time before there are guide books to such sites, following the example of Robert Smithson’s essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’. There is already a J.G. Ballard group on Flickr, where seekers of the Modernist picturesque can view and deposit photographs of decaying military installations, abandoned hotels, failed utopias and entropic ruins.

Wooden boulder

There is an interview with David Nash in Sculpture Magazine where he says “I think Andy Goldsworthy and I, and Richard Long, and most of the British artists’ collectives associated with Land art would have been landscape painters a hundred years ago. But we don’t want to make portraits of the landscape. A landscape picture is a portrait. We don’t want that. We want to be in the land.”

From a landscape perspective, one of Nash’s most interesting works is Wooden Boulder. This 25 year project is the subject of a documentary film, Boulder, by Pete Telfe, and various photographs and drawings by Nash. It began in 1978 when Nash was asked to fell an oak tree, for safety reasons, that overhung a cottage at Bronturnor, North Wales. Nash cut part of the tree into a large wooden ‘boulder’ with the aim of taking it back to his studio as a wood ‘quarry’. However, he decided instead to push it into the nearby stream, where it became wedged between rocks beneath a waterfall. This, Nash felt, was the right place for it. However, the wooden boulder’s journey had only just begun and in March 1979 it was washed into the pool beneath the waterfall. Nash then decided to give it a helping hand, pushing it over the next waterfall to another pool, where it rested eight years, taking on the appearance of a real boulder. What had originally been intended as the source of a sculpture had become a work of environmental art. The boulder remained in the stream whilst the landscape changed around it, but it continued to move intermittently when the river swelled.

By 1994, Wooden Boulder was resting below the road bridge just before the stream meets the river Dwyryd. David Nash has described the subsequent course of the boulder (see the Annely Juda Fine Art site): “I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime. Then in November 2002 it was gone. The ‘goneness’ was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwyryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile…. The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.”

Dry and verdant branches

In the July 2005 edition of Apollo Magazine, Clovis Whitfield describes the Arcadian landscapes of Francesco Cozza (1605-82). Whitfield is an expert on this period and a dealer in Old Masters (Whitfield Fine Art). The article reflects the connoisseurial importance of identifying Cozza’s landscapes and distinguishing them from more famous contemporaries and influences such as Claude, Poussin, Gaspar Dughet and Domenichino. For example, in discussing two paintings in the style of Claude, Whitfield says that “it is the figures in particular that suggest Cozza’s authorship, but the definition of the trees and foliage also reveals his handwriting.” From a landscape perspective it is perhaps these small differences in the natural elements that are most interesting. It is tempting to imagine that even fairly derivative work can hide a distinctive view of nature, even though Cozza’s trees and foliage are more likely simply to reflect his method of applying paint in the pursuit of idealised landscapes.

Here is a description of the way Cozza paints nature, in Clovis Whitfield’s discussion of a painting in the Rijksmuseum: “the dry and verdant branches of the trees, crossed trunks and sprouting mullein-like foliage on a dry and stony ground in the Amsterdam Hagar and Ishmael are a distinctive language. The trunks of the trees criss-cross the canvas in a way that recalls Poussin in his so-called ‘Silver Birch’ phase, with a dappled light catching the uneven bark. The branches seem to be laid out flat, like fern fronds, while it is the colouring that gives the foliage variety of appearance and depth.” Cozza’s landscape sounds caught between art and nature, both lifeless and alive, like those “dry and verdant branches”, or the “sprouting foliage on a dry and stony ground”.

Francesco Cozza, Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness, 1665

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Singing sands

Landscapes can be more or less musical. Desert sands have been known to sing and beaches that are silent when wet, can sound underfoot like Japanese koto music. David Toop mentions these phenomena in his book Ocean of Sound (1995). He refers to the researches of Shigeo Miwa into the gradual disappearance of singing sands across the world. A sample from Pensacola Beach in Florida was restored to voice by being boiled in water for 40 minutes to remove the pollutants. The sample is now in the Nima Sand Museum in Japan.

Since David Toop’s book there has been further research into the phenomenon of singing sounds. New Scientist reported last year that ‘Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS and his colleagues shipped sand from Moroccan singing dunes back to his lab to investigate. They found that they could play notes by pushing the sand by hand, or with a metal handle.’ You can hear impressive sounds of sands recorded by Doady at his website.

Singing sands are now being utilised by composers like Pippa Murphy (‘Voix du Sable’). The most famous British site for singing sands is on the Isle of Eigg. My only experience of a sand soundscape was Squeaky Beach, Wilson’s Promontory, Australia: the photograph below was taken there in 1996.

Deer in snow

Ronald Hepburn’s essay ‘Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature’, argues that whilst it is ‘trivial’ to engage in an unreflective superficial reading of a landscape, it is just as trivial to resort to an ‘ironical, anti-Romantic, belittling, levelling reaction’ to the idea that landscapes can be beautiful. There is a balance to be struck. Nature needs to be respected and seen on its own terms, but this does not mean that only a detailed or objective ‘scientific’ reaction is acceptable. It is valid to appreciate natural landscapes in terms of metaphor, as long as we do not simply fall back on dead metaphors. Aesthetic appreciation of a landscape will involve the viewer in shaping the disparate elements into a unified whole, but serious appreciation means at the same time not losing site of the arbitrariness and otherness of nature.

In another essay reprinted in The Reach of the Aesthetic (2001), ‘Data and Theory in Aesthetics’ Hepburn continues this theme. He uses the example of a view of deer moving across a hillside in the snow. Here it is not essential to keep in mind the facts of ‘forestry as commerce or animals as food’ but, it is necessary to attend to the reality of this natural event rather than automatically experience it selectively according to pre-existing aesthetic criteria. Must an awareness of environmental concerns colour our appreciation of nature? “Certainly our cherishing of aesthetic experience must not be allowed to displace practical efforts to reduce environmental threats and dangers. But neither do these dangers have to dominate all our approaches to nature. There is room – and great need – for both.”

Hepburn also disagrees with Stan Godlovitch, who has argued for an aesthetic appreciation that recognises the categorical otherness of nature, implying a sense of being outside oneself. For Hepburn we do belong in nature and therefore the partial understanding we possess, conditioned by our culture, is a legitimate starting point for aesthetic appreciation. This appreciation should be is a synthesis that simultaneously encompasses nature’s mutability and stability, the landscape’s present appearance infused with a sense of its past.

Somerset Place, Bath

There is a good essay by Julian Stallabrass, originally published in New Left Review, available on-line at the Courtauld Institute site, ‘Success and Failure of Peter Fuller’. Stallabrass says “for most of his career Fuller was beyond the pale of the art establishment; initially for his materialism, then for the accessibility of his writing, which at points threatened to puncture art's divine, money-spinning mystery, and later for his conservative debunking of the avant-garde. There was however a period in the mid to late eighties when it seemed as though Fuller might actually succeed in his task of turning the tide in favour of a conservative, specifically English art.”

Fuller promoted painters of the School of London and an interest in neo-Romantics like John Piper. Piper was interviewed in the second edition of Fuller’s magazine Modern Painters (Summer 1988). Fuller starts the article with a discussion of the post-war fate of Bath, whose ruins were bombed and painted by Piper, e.g. in Somerset Place, Bath (1942). He sees the possible re-birth of art after Modernism paralleled in the gradual healing of Bath after the horrors visited upon it by insensitive sixties architects. Fuller views Piper as a progressive force and argues that Piper’s work had actually been at its weakest when it tried to accommodate modernism and the influence of contemporary artists like Richard Hamilton (a friend of Piper’s).

It is interesting now to look back at the sort of artists Fuller praised. Later in the same issue of Modern Painters, Fuller reviews and defends the work of two landscape painters, Paul Hempton, who is “not nostalgic”, and Michael Williams, who is “not ashamed” to be a water-colourist. Fuller writes that the current (1988) “remarkable revival” of landscape painting may eventually be recognised as “one of the most significant developments in British art of the current decade”. I think it’s safe to say that this recognition hasn’t happened yet…

Corsons Inlet

A. R. Ammons’ ‘Corsons Inlet’ is one of the best known twentieth century landscape poems and has generated much discussion about poetic form since its publication in 1965. The poem evokes the movement of a walk in its shapes and rhythms. Here, for example, are the opening lines

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning 

to the sea, 

then turned right along 

   the surf 

              rounded a naked headland 

              and returned 

    along the inlet shore:

There are a series of critical reflections on the poem in the useful Modern American Poetry site. Five examples:

• Richard Grey (in American Poetry of the Twentieth Century) discusses the form of the poem as a field rather than a closed object, “There are, Ammons suggests, 'no / ... changeless shapes': the poet-seer must invent structures that imitate the metamorphic character of things. The organisms he creates must respond to life as particularity and process; they must be dynamic, unique to each occasion; above all, they must be open.”

• Paul Lake (‘The Shape of Poetry’ in Poetry after Modernism. Ed. Robert McDowell) thinks that modern developments in chaos theory go against the idea that landscape lacks formal structure. By analogy, there may be more promise in formal poetry than is suggested by the organic natural form Ammons was writing in ‘Corsons Inlet’.

• Bonnie Costello (‘The Soil & Man's Intelligence: Three Contemporary Landscape Poets’, Contemporary Literature 30:3) notes that for Ammons the "mirroring mind" is “not mimetic so much as congruent, finding coordinates to match, not copy, the particulars of the landscape.”

• Steven P. Schneider (in A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope), echoing Harold Bloom, writes that in ‘Corsons Inlet’ Ammons “finds "direct sight" more liberating than the contemplation of the Sublime. In Ammons's universe, the apperception of physical, manifest phenomena and processes yields pleasure and sometimes pain. Despite the lure of the Transcendent, he resists it.”

• John Elder (Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature) says that in Ammons’ poetry the “sequence of natural shifts and the path of human consciousness” provide “an ecologically balanced art”.

Land of Darkness

Thomas Jones is renowned for his Italian oil sketches, but should be just as well known for his memoirs, which are often cited by historians of eighteenth century landscape painting, but, bafflingly, remain out of print. They can be read in Volume 32 of the proceedings of the Walpole Society (for 1946-48). In this extract Thomas Jones and Francis Towne find that Nature can occasionally be just too Picturesque...

June 2^nd 1781 This day crossing the Mola piccola I saw a large crowd of People assembled round two circular vacant Spots about ten or twelve pases asunder - in each of these lay a man extended on his back with a knife in his hand - dead - It seems two of the Sbirri or guard of the Place had a quarrel, stabbed each other, and both fell - getting through the multitude as well as I could I proceeded to meet Pars, according to appointment at an Osteria in the road to S'a M'a de Monti - In this hollow Way is a most beautiful Series of picturesque Objects, which I discovered by Accident in one of my perambulations - Here may be visibly traced the scenery that Salvator Rosa formed himself upon - Only taking away the Pinetrees, which were, perhaps, a planted since his time, and which indicate a State of Cultivation not suited to his gloomy mind, with the addition of Water & a few Banditti - And every hundred yards presents you with a new and perfect Composition of that Master - When Towne was in Naples, I took him with me to this romantick place, with which he seemed much delighted - but the following whimsical Incident put a stop to further explorations at that time and which I forgot to mention in its proper place - Proceeding up the valley whose boundaries contracted more and more as we advanced, increasing in proportion the Gloominess of the Scene; We arrived at a Spot, which might very properly have been termed the Land of Darkness and the Shadow of Death - This sequestered place was environed on all Sides, with hanging Rocks here and there protruding themselves from behind dark masses of a variety of Wild Shrubs, and overshadowed by branching Trees - Here, says I, Mr Towne, is Salvator Rosa in perfection we only want Banditti to compleat the Picture - I had scarcely uttered these words, when turning round a Projection of Rocks, we all-at once pop'd upon three ugly-looking fellows dressed in the fantastic garb of the Sbirri di Campagna, with long knives, cutting up a dead jackAss… Towne started back as if struck by an electric Shock… "I'll go no further" says he, with a most solemn face, adding with a forced smile, that however he might admire Scenes in a Picture - he did not relish them in Nature, - So we wheeled about and returned to the more cultivated environs of the City.

Distant View of Lowestoft

Thomas Kerrich, Distant View of Lowestoft from the South (possibly 1794)

In looking at early oil sketches from nature there is a sense that they are pure views unencumbered by picturesque formulae, not only fresher than academic landscapes, but also offering some kind of direct window on the past. This is particularly true when the painting is a simple objective study of a hill, a clump of trees or some scattered buildings, rather than familiar tourist views such as Tivoli, Posillipo, or the Baths of Caracalla. Eighteenth century sketches pre-dating photography are particularly interesting in this respect and the works of Thomas Jones (1742-1803), Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) and Simon Denis (1755-1812) have grown in reputation over the last fifty years.

Collectors have also discovered more obscure painters, like Thomas Kerrich (1748-1828), a Cambridge antiquarian and librarian who was best known as a draughtsman. One oil sketch by Kerrich is on long term loan to the National Gallery, a Distant View of Lowestoft from the South (possibly 1794), part of the Gere collection of oil sketches. It is a simple view of a bay on a rather grey English day, with broad expanses of sand, sea and sky and very little topographical detail. As Christopher Riopelle noted in the catalogue to A Brush with Nature: The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches (1999), ‘the simplicity and directness of this image suggest a precocious and original approach to landscape. The work of a trained artist, but not essentially a painter, it is at the same time remarkably unfettered by a reliance on conventional landscape formulae.’ 

The Hudson Valley in Winter from Olana

Frederic Edwin Church, Winter Twilight from Olana, 1871

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The National Academy Museum in New York is currently hosting the touring exhibition ‘Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church’. Olana is the Persian style home Church built overlooking the Hudson (see the Olana website). Chuch made sure that after his death in 1900 the house and its contents would remain together.

 

In his review of the exhibition in the New York Review of Books, John Updike points out the irony that this crowded oriental fantasy house crammed with Victorian bric-a-brac should also house Church’s freshest works: rapid oil sketches that the artist kept and framed. The Hudson Valley in Winter from Olana (c 1871-2, 13 x 20 ¼ inches) for example is praised by Updike for the “dashing dabble of rapid brown strokes that does for winter foliage”, “the boldly crude splatter of white clouds scattered on the blue sky overhead” and snow “more creamy, and drifts more sweepingly indicated” than can be found in the landscapes of almost any other American painters.

 

It is of course a familiar story - the oil sketches of a celebrated artist appealing more to modern tastes than the large scale finished works. It will be interesting to see how this theme is addressed in the forthcoming Constable show at Tate Britain. Another British parallel to Church is Lord Leighton, whose vivid oil sketches are often much more appealing than the paintings that brought him fame and the presidency of the Royal Academy. Like Church, Leighton was fascinated by the Near East and created for himself an idealised oriental space in Leighton House (this interior photograph dates from about 1879). It too is open to the public and is, I am told, an excellent party venue.

Streets of Paris

Back in August 1992 there was an article in Sight and Sound by Peter Wollen about cities in film. I made a note at the time that, according to Wollen, there was someone at the City of Paris museum who was aiming to build up ‘a library on disc which would allow viewers to find all the moving images made of any given street in Paris in any given year. Ultimately a global dream archive would cover all the major cities of the world.’ Was this a real project? I cannot see anything about it on-line so perhaps, if it was a plan, it came to nothing. However, it is easier to envisage now than it would have been in 1992... Someone should do it.

Ruined apartment building, Khabul

Simon Norfolk was another landscape photographer talking at Tate Modern on Friday (as part of ‘Art Photography Now: Landscape’) and like Elina Brotherus he draws on the work of earlier landscape painters. As he says in the ‘Et In Arcadia Ego’ section of his website, the techniques of Claude and Poussin provide an inspiration for the way he composes his photographs of Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. See for example, the image of a partially ruined apartment building in the Karte Char district of Khabul, with its pastoral sheep and golden light. This is a war zone seen through a Claude glass. On the face of it his use of these pastoral nostalgic references is ironic. It tempts the viewer to see the images as beautiful before the accompanying text provides the grim context. However, Norfolk also wants to associate these images with the ‘dark side’ of classical and picturesque landscape painting, where even the ruins in old paintings are understood to reflect real histories of decline or destruction.

Postscript: since writing this it has become possible to add videoclips from YouTube.  Here is Simon Norfolk talking about the way his photographs relate to those of the nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke.

Very low horizon

Continuing the theme of Mark Rothko’s influence, there is the contemporary example of Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus. In Low Horizon (2) (2000) the cloud has the consistency of Rothko’s paint and Horizon 7 (2000) resembles one of Rothko’s late black paintings. In other works, like Very Low Horizon 2 (2001), she reduces the landscape to a zip of colour and creates an image that recalls the paintings of Barnett Newman. Speaking at Tate Modern on Friday, Brotherus was happy to talk about the influence of painters like these (she also mentioned Cézanne, Bonnard and Vuillard), but it is clearly their formal characteristics that she is interested in: colour, light, shapes… She is not particularly interested in landscape per se. Her photographs use the landscape like a palette to explore the concerns of Modernist painting, and indeed her recent work has been exhibited under the title, ‘The New Painting’.

Postscript, ten years later

Looking back at this I see the links to the images no longer work and don't appear on the artist's website, but you can google them.  One of her photographs from 'The New Painting', Der Wanderer, has since been used as the cover for a useful survey of landscape photography by Liz Wells, Land Matters (2011). In this book Wells notes that in updating Capar David Friedrich (e.g. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog) Elina Brotherus unseats the male gaze, but also, more generally, her work shows the female body at ease in and unthreatened by the environment.  The video below, Silent Lake, is one of several she has made over the years in which the artist walks out into a Finnish lake (I'm not too sure about the musical accompaniment, although it gets less jaunty halfway through!)  The ripples she creates are a kind of ephemeral land art, linking her body to the wider landscape.

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Contemporary sunset

Sunset from our bedroom window

Mark Rothko denied his abstract paintings were in any way supposed to be landscapes, although he is reported to have said at the 1964 Turner show in New York “that chap Turner learned a lot from me.” That year there was a New Yorker cartoon with a modish couple staring out at a sunset over the sea, the view resembling a Rothko painting, the caption: “Now, there’s a nice contemporary sunset.” The cartoon reminds me of comments on Turner in Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying (1889):

“Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter’s worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasised.”

The question this raises in relation to Rothko is over the extent to which our aesthetic response to landscapes is now affected by the form of Rothko’s paintings, even though Rothko himself was engaged in abstract expressionism. And whether this in turn leads artists to adopt Rothko-like compositions for their landscapes, as in Andreas Gursky’s Rhein (1996).

Nacreous cloud, Iceland

There are various sites about rainbows and related atmospheric effects, e.g. the excellent Atmospheric Optics site. A recent addition is an extraordinary nacreous cloudscape in Iceland, whilst elsewhere there are images of a glory and broken spectre in Ireland, a low bow in Australia and a moon bow in Hawaii. The site provides technical information and software for simulating different optical effects: HaloSim. There is also some history: Lowitz arcs are named after Tobias Lowitz, who sketched a complex display visible from St Petersburg on June 18^th 1790, and Parry arcs were first recorded by William Perry on 8 April 1820, near Melvile Island in the Canadian Arctic, during the search for the Northwest Passage.

Postscript August 2015

This early post was written before I was able to easily embed images and videos so I have included a timelapse video of nacreous clouds.  It was also written before I decided to restrict this blog to the arts, although of course those links involve many spectacular photographs.  Nacreous clouds in literature?  It is now possible to do a search in Google Books which turns up a novel by the poet Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage (1927), set on a cruise ship, in which they sound like ice cream: 'The half-opened windows opposite, rising, scooped a rapid green evening sky; then slowly, forwardly, swooped again, scooping a nacreaous cloud touched with flamingo.'

  Jacob Heinrich Elbfas, Vädersolstavlan, 1636

I would also like to add in here a remarkable 17th century painting of Stockholm, the Vädersolstavlan, depicting a halo display event in 1535.  It is a copy of an original, now lost, by Urban Målare.  The painting has become an iconic image, appearing on banknotes, stamps, metro stations and Swedish tourist gifts.  There is a lengthy article on it on Wikipedia covering the topographical and meteorological details, its historical/political background and the possible artistic precedents - Albrecht Altdorfer and his less-well-known brother Erhard who was responsible for some apocalyptic Bible illustrations.

Buttermere Lake, a shower

In his book Colour and Culture John Gage discusses the way in which a few artists of the Romantic period strove to paint unusual forms of the rainbow. There are double rainbows by Constable, a parhelion by Cotman (in a drawing of 1815) and a lunar rainbow in a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich (1808). Depicting strange atmospheric effects could have appealed either as a form of scientific naturalism or as a means of heightening the mood of sublime landscapes. Given the opportunity they afforded for examples of artistic virtuosity, it is perhaps surprising that examples of these strange rainbows are relatively rare. However it is consistent with the sense that mere ‘accidents of light’ did not really have a place in classical landscape painting (as was indicated by Joshua Reynolds in his fourth Discourse). Nevertheless, rainbows in general were frequently used, retaining some of their symbolic value from earlier periods of art. Turner was perhaps the most prominent exponent and his Buttermere Lake, Cumberland, a shower of 1798 is just the first landscape with a rainbow that he exhibited. It shows the rare white fog bow.

J. M. W. Turner Buttermere Lake, Cumberland, a shower (1798)
Source: Wikimedia Commons (The Atheneum)

A panorama of New York

In his unfinished novel Amerika, Franz Kafka's hero leaves New York to wander through a landscape that has more in common with Austria than America (translator Michael Hofmann describes it as an 'exploded Bohemia'). There is one particularly moving description:

“The road started to climb and when they stopped from time to time they could see, looking back, the panorama of New York and its harbour continually unfolding. The bridge that connected New York with Boston lay slender across the Hudson, and trembled if you narrowed your eyes. It seemed to be carrying no traffic at all, and below it was the smooth unanimated ribbon of water.”

Of course whether or not Kafka meant to write 'Boston' or ‘Brooklyn’ is irrelevant, for this is Amerika, a European dream landscape.