Two exhibitions

A year ago, I posted the following blog. Having just re-read it, I thought it deserved to be published afresh. Here it is.

About once a month, two of us have a day in London. Buildings, plays, art galleries, walks, rides on the river. That sort of thing. A day - well, half a day - in London. The usual meeting-place is the Royal Academy, and so it was yesterday.

Neither of us had heard of Jacob van Ruisdael, a Dutch landscape painter, but his name has registered with us now. We were entranced by his landscapes. At first, what we saw we expected to see. There was an order about the land he showed. Neat hedges, orderly towns, a developed land. The surprises came when we were taken to the natural landscapes. A castle, a Gewrman one, sited on the top of a hill, a hill that was stood higher above the land in the picture than it did on the ground. The painter's imagination was at work. Amongst the Dutch, and the nearly-Dutch landscapes, was a painting of a highland stream (which could have been a Highland stream). Brown rocks, rushing waters, tree trunks about to be carried away. A wild, highland place. It was labelled Norway but, so we heard, van Ruisdael had never been to the country. The imagination was at work.

Seascapes too, and people. In one, the wind is blowing strongly. You can see it in the clouds, in the waves, and in the sailing boat, with its red sails, that is leaning periliously. A sand spit juts from the shore. It's narrow, so the waves will rush across it. No place for people. Yet, look closely, and notice the person near the end of the spit with a pram. A pram. Two other people walk side-by-side back to the shore as if they were walking along a promenade on a spring day. The power of the picture lies in the elements, the sea, the wind, the clouds. The people? As in some of the other ones, they are adjuncts. There can be an awkwardness about them. They are add-ons, and in some pictures that's what we heard they had been. They had been added on.

Keep the elemental and the imaginative in mind as you join us in The Gothic Imagination at Tate Ancient, our name for what others call Tate Britain. This exhibition is about the realisation of what we see and imagine in the dead of night. The pictures express the dark side. Fuesli is the name we now know. He painted The Nightmare, the painting that catches the eye on the advertisements for the exhibition. The young woman, n a muslin-like nightdress, lies asleep on a bed, uncovered by bedclothes. On her stomach sit an incubus, a mis-formed of the dark imagination. The creature is looking at us, and we do not know what the looks portends. A horse has pushed its head through the opening of what appears to be a tent. The eyes are white balls. Painted and shown to acclaim in the 1780s (I recall). Other pictures express equally unsettling images from the night-time imagination.

But what stunning exhibitions they were. How good to have the opportunity to see them, to see them in company so that there can be a discussion, a reflection. How good to be able to visit two such exhibitions in one day in London. And to roam around on buses. There's not just a lot to be said for London. There is everything.

Worth re-posting? I think so.

Don