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Imitations of the pasture
J. M. W. Turner, The Deer in Petworth Park, 1827 In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen argued that different views of what is beautiful reflect a 'code of reputability' that...
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From pastoral ruin to pastoral ruin
The amphitheatre, Caerleon, August 2014 In Wales last summer we visited the remains of Caerleon, the City of the Legions. Charlotte Higgins stopped there too in her journey round Roman Britain, Under...
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Cha-atl
Emily Carr, Kitwancool, 1928Wikimedia Commons 'Emily Who? Outside Canada, no one’s ever heard of Emily Carr, the iconic landscape painter whose remarkable career spanned the first half of the 20th...
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Picturing Sheffield
When I first started coming regularly to Sheffield in the late nineties it was to work in a building described in Owen Hatherley's The New Ruins of Great Britain (2010) as a 'thrillingly paranoid Cold...
View ArticleOf Walking in Ice
A few days before Bruce Chatwin's death in January 1989 he asked Werner Herzog to visit him. They shared a belief in the restorative powers of walking and Chatwin was convinced that Herzog had healing...
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The Louvre of the Pebble
We were at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge last weekend to seeBeauty and Revolution: The Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay. You can read a review of this in the FT and I also recommend a post on Ken...
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The evergreen forest seethes and roars
There are still a couple of weeks to see From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, an exhibition I have already referred to here. It was her paintings of trees that most impressed me...
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When I behold a stream...
The river at Pyrford Place,where John Donne lived at the start of the 17th centuryJohn Donne's sixth Elegy contains a remarkable landscape metaphor in which his inconstant lover is compared to a river...
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Clouds break over the land, spring light stirs
From a 1996 interview for the Paris Review on the Art of Poetry:'Interviewer:Since we are talking about Chinese poetry I wanted to ask you about the Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain Poems. It is...
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Bark of rivers and roof of the wave
IsIs byþ oferceald, ungemetum slidor,glisnaþ glæshluttur gimmum gelicust,flor forste geworuht, fæger ansyne. These lines come from one of the old rune poems, in which descriptive verses were associated...
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Landmarks
You might feel you have read enough about Landmarks over the last few days - an essay by Robert Mafarlane in The Guardian introducing his new book (which, as I write this, has been 'shared' 39,000...
View ArticleThe Black Earth
Last Sunday we were at the Sir John Soane church at Bethnal Green for the third and final performance of 'Landscape', three sets of new music by Rob St. John, Laura Cannell and Richard Skelton. The...
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Lake Mashū
I have just finished reading Nicolas Bouvier's Japanese Chronicles (1989, translated by Anne Dickerson) a compilation of travel sketches based on his experiences in the country between 1955 and 1970....
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A landscape of touch and double-touch
From the film Possession (2002): poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry AshThese two fictional nineteenth century poets in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession (1990) both draw inspiration from nature....
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In the Cairngorms
We spent last weekend at a remarkable wedding in the Cairngorms National Park. I'm not sure if I was technically 'in the Cairngorms', in the Nan Shepherd sense, as we didn't get to explore the...
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Everywhere they tossed grass and flowers
Jan Wildens, May - Walk in the Avenue, c. 1615On this first day of the month here is a delightful May painting that I saw a few weeks ago at The Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. The Italian title of the...
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The Road to San Giovanni
In Liguria recently I took on our walks my much-read copy of Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors, which contains his short novel The Baron in the Trees. In the book's introduction Calvino says that its...
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The Virgin and Child in a Landscape
Jan Provoost, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape (detail), early 16th centuryI managed a few minutes in the National Gallery at lunchtime yesterday resting my eyes on this landscape by Jan Provoost....
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Wave Movements
Billboard poster advertising Mountains and Waves, Highbury, April 2015We were at the Barbican on Sunday for the last concert in a weekend of new music entitled 'Mountains and Waves'. The first half...
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The sound of water escaping from Mill dams
John Constable, Stratford Mill, c. 1820Source: Wikimedia Commons (National Gallery)Anglers often appear in the paintings of John Constable, who had gone fishing on the Stour in his youth. In his...
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