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Rising sun over the landscape of Mount Paektu
Last week I discussed here the way artists over the centuries have depicted Korea's Diamond Mountains, but these extraordinary peaks are are not the most revered landscape in this part of the world....
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Water and sky, suspended like a dream
Gerald Bullett (1893-1958) is perhaps not very well known today, but he was a fairly prolific writer and according to Wikipedia (quoting a 1950 dictionary of authors), a "liberal socialist" who claimed...
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Chateau d'If
Two years ago I wrote here about the plans-reliefs that Andrew Graham-Dixon visited for a TV documentary - he described them as 'a collection of extraordinary but largely forgotten' table-top...
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Vaux-le-Vicomte
Last month we visited the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, just outside Paris. It was the home of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's finance minister, and was the creation of three great seventeenth century...
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Sentences on the sea
I am looking forward to reading Experiments on Reality, a new collection of essays by Tim Robinson. Googling him this weekend and looking at his Wikipedia page, it struck me that for all the praise...
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Troubled Waters
This cool poster gives a strong impression of 'Troubled Waters', an alternative title for Mauritz Stiller's Johan. The film was an adaptation of Juhani Aho's Finnish novel, published a decade earlier...
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This earth is cursed
I was at the White Cube on Sunday to see the latest batch of Anselm Kiefer paintings, Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot. I am a huge admirer, but I know he does not appeal to everyone. For...
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Hanging Gardens of Rock City
A detail from Hanging Gardens of Rock City (1970) by Liliane LijnIn the British Museum at the moment you can see Hanging Gardens of Rock City, a collage by Liliane Lijn. It was one of four she made in...
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Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city
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 and less frequent in future. This is partly because I've...
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A terrace of incense lit by the dawn
I have been reading the Tang Dynasty poet Wei Yingwu (737-92) in Red Pine's award-winning translation, In Such Hard Times (2009). Anyone who has read Chinese poetry will know of the An Lushan...
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Goethe's oak
Paintings in the Goethe House, FrankfurtI was on something of a Goethe pilgrimage last weekend, with five stops, beginning in his childhood home in Frankfurt. This was where he began Faust and wrote...
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Water, the unsteady element
Georg Melchior Kraus, Weimar Römisches Haus, 1799A building in the Park an der Ilm, based on an idea by GoetheGoethe's novel Elective Affinities (1809) is about attraction and marriage, duty and...
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Woodland Scenery with Hermits
Pieter Stevens, Woodland Scenery with Hermits, 1614This beautiful, atmospheric landscape painting is just 6.9 x 12.8 cm, as you can see from the photo with my hand below. What makes it so enchanting...
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Clouds Sweeping Distant Mountains
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 copy seems to have survived the Mongol invasion of 1276 and this...
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A bend in the river
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. These Polaroids were on show in London a couple of years ago and I...
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In jasmine country, it is evening
Marutam, Queen's Flower, Lagerstroemia speciosa Source: Mokkie In the afterword to A. K. Ramanujan's celebrated anthology of classical Tamil love poetry, The Interior Landscape (1967), there is a...
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Mirages of landscapes leaping upwards
In July 1942, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Tullio Crali published in Rome a Futurist Manifesto entitled 'Plastic Illusionism of War and Perfecting the Earth'. It was inspired by Crali's work on...
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An artificial island on the Arno
Netherlandish Master, after Jacques Callot, The Mock Battle Between the Weavers' and Dyers' Guildson the Arno in Florence on 25 July 1619 (detail), c. 1620In seventeenth century Florence there was an...
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White torrents and emerald depths
Because this blog focuses on the arts, I have rarely mentioned books by geographers, although it goes without saying that they often write beautifully about landscape. In A Commentary on the Book of...
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Wandering on the Tiantai Mountains
Unknown artist, Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion, 1790Source: Wikimedia CommonsThis landscape in jade shows Mount Kuaiji (in present-day Zhejiang) and the...
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