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Mundus Subterraneus
I have been immersed in Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World, a (literally) wonderful and wittily-written book about the great seventeenth century polymath. Its author Joscelyn Godwin is...
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Sleeping Dragon Ridge
Yosa Buson, Liu Bei visited Zhuge Liang in his hermitage three times, 18th centurySource: Wikimedia CommonsThis beautiful winter scene was painted by the great Japanese haiku poet and artist, Yosa...
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The Schmadribach Falls
Joseph Anton Koch, The Schmadribach Waterfall above Lauterbrunnen, c. 1793Last month the Evening Standard carried a headline saying that 'The British Museum just bought a drawing for £68,000'. The...
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Jones Beach Piece
Next month a Joan Jonas retrospective is due to open at Tate Modern - you can read an interview in Tate Etc. I should probably wait and see this before writing about her work here, but I just found...
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Anglers, Mülheim
Last week we went to the reopened Hayward Gallery for its big Andreas Gursky retrospective. Twenty years ago, everyone seemed to be talking about Gursky: there was, for example, a show at the...
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The calmness of that beauty
I was pleased when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize last year, partly because I loved The Buried Giant, despite the misgivings of some critics. Of all his novels, the one that seems to be most...
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Nine acres of orchids
'The fluttering swallows leave on their homeward journey;The forlorn cicada makes no sound;The wild geese call as they travel southwards;The partridge chatters with a mournful cry.''Jiu bian', 'Nine...
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Feelings from Mountain and Water
Feelings from Mountain and Water (山水情) is essentially an animated ink painting. It is a film about a master of the guqin, an instrument that seems to embody the Chinese landscape, as I have discussed...
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Landscape splinters
... All around them the mountaintops rose up into the clear sky. Marie thought they looked as if they were made of porcelain, and although Egger had never seen porcelain in his life he agreed with her....
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The Nymph of the Luo River
Gu Kaizhi, The Nymph of the Luo River, Song Dynasty copy of a 4th century original (detail)I love the magical green landscape into which the nymph is disappearing in this painting. How closely this...
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Battle on the Ice
In the sections on landscape and music in my book Frozen Air, I wrote about the difficulty of translating the physical forms of cliffs into music. However, in Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei...
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Boisgeloup in the Rain
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy is a wonderful exhibition, well worth the five stars Laura Cumming gave it in The Guardian. There are many highlights but I suspect few critics will draw anyone's...
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A slab of landscape
Paul Nash, Sketch for Empty Room, 1938 I am always interested in moments where interior and exterior change places and landscape somehow begins to appear within a building. An early draft of Frozen...
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Picturing Paradise
Li Cheng, A Solitary Temple Among Clearing Peaks, Song Dynasty We have got rather behind in watching Civilisations on the iPlayer, so I have only just seen Simon Schama's episode concerning landscape,...
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Pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow
As I mentioned in January, finding female landscape painters to highlight in my 'tweet of the day' has been quite difficult, partly because social restrictions reduced their ability to go out sketching...
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Plum blossoms, green willows, warblers, and wine
Cherry Walk, Kew GardensLast weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom. It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a...
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Zabriskie Point
Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point (1970) is named for the ancient lake beds where it is partially set. The two protagonists Daria and Mark drive to this viewpoint and explore its dry slopes...
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Shanglin Park
Qiu Ying (attributed), Shanglin Park (detail), 16th centuryOne of the most famous descriptions of landscape in Chinese literature must be the Shanglin fu,上林賦,, composed by Sima Xiangru. It was...
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The paulownia of Lung-men
Ming Dynasty painting of a scholar playing a qin in a landscapeSource: Wikimedia Commons Having just written a post about Chinese rhyme-prose (fu) I can't quite bear to leave the topic, which is full...
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Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting
Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934The Tacita Dean exhibition Landscapestarts today, but before I get to that, I wanted to mention here the Still Life exhibition which is still on for a few more days...
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