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The Gardens of Fontainebleau
Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1868Source: Wikimedia CommonsThe Forest of Fontainebleau has a special place in the history of western landscape art: painted repeatedly by the Barbizon...
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Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery
I was in Stockholm for a meeting in May and took the opportunity to visit Skogskyrkogården, the famous Woodland Cemetery which in 1994 became only the second location developed in the twentieth century...
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Igualada Cemetery
Commenting yesterday on my post about the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery, Ken Worpole, author of Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West, mentioned his high regard for the modern...
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View of the Garden of the Villa Medici
Diego Velázquez, View of the Garden of the Villa Medici, c. 1630Source: Wikimedia CommonsIn the course of her fascinating book on Velázquez, The Vanishing Man, published last year, Laura Cumming...
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From the flowers of summer
Having mentioned in my last post one enjoyable book published last year, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend another, Christopher de Hamel's much-praised Meetings with Remarkable...
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Hoar Frost
Camille Pissarro, Landscape, St. Thomas, 1856Source: Wikimedia CommonsI was reading in the news the other day about a forthcoming Tate exhibition, Impressionists in London, French artists in exile...
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Taste of a Stone
TheDocumenta 14 catalogue is organised in a way that appeals to my fondness for chronologies - each of the 163 living artists is allotted a double page corresponding to a day during the duration of the...
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When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night...I woke up early this mornin', a water hole in my back yard...Backwater rising, come in my windows and door... If it keeps on rainin', levee's...
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The Panorama of Thun
Whilst it is obviously true that any landscape painting loses something in reproduction, this is especially true of a panorama. It is not just a question of losing the aura of the original artwork;...
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Bellevue
Robert Zünd, Buchenwald, 1887Source: Wikimedia CommonsIn English the word 'Buchenwald' is synonymous with horror and darkness, but in German it still denotes one of nature's most beautiful things, a...
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Chain Pier, Brighton
John Constable, Chain Pier, Brighton, 1826-7Source: Wikimedia Commons Turner versus Constable... You can compare the two greatest figures in British landscape art directly in their paintings of the...
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Crags, upon whose extreme edge I stand...
And thou fresh breaking Day, and you, ye Mountains, Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.And thou, the bright eye of the universe, That openest over all, and unto all Art a delight—thou shin’st not...
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A meadow, a wood, and a few peaceful houses
'For anyone who has watched with anticipation as the writings of Robert Walser (1878-1956) have slowly appeared in English over the past two decades or so, Carl Seelig’s Wanderungen mit Robert...
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An architectural view surrounded by trompe-l’oeil elements
Charles-Joseph Flipart, Landscape with an architectural view surrounded by trompe-l’oeil elements symbolising the Arts, c. 1779 Image from the Prado site for non-commercial useThis painting is two...
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Landscape near Malines
The Listener magazine, founded by John Reith as a cultural supplement to the BBC's Radio Times, folded in 1991. I think I remember some sadness when it ended, but it doesn't seem to have been much...
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The Reichenbach Falls
J. M. W. Turner, The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of Hasle, Switzerland, 1804Source: Wikimedia CommonsTurner painted the Reichenbach Falls before they became famous as the setting for...
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This snow has never melted
Anon (once attributed to Guo Xi), Mount Emei under Heavy Snow, 17th centuryMount Omei, or Emei, in Sichuan province, is one of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China and has often featured in...
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The yellow blossoms of autumn
Eight poems entitled, simply, 'Landscape':1. 'Landscape' by Robert GrayA walk over sandhills by the sea, turning inland, then wading through dead grass and along railway tracks in the heat of noon,...
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Frozen Air
For this, the 1000th entry on this blog, I am pleased to announce... a book.If you have liked some of what I have written here over the years I think you should enjoy it. It is not a reprint of...
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Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees
Zhao Mengfu, Autumn Colours on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, 1296Back to normal now, for blog post number 1,001, and at this time of year it seems appropriate to admire these Autumn Colours on the Qiao...
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