Unquiet Landscape, Thunderclap

 'The landscape is meaningless again, and unresponsive. Nothing we can do will rouse it from its absolute inertia. Shout, and no echo comes. Love it lifelong, and not one blade of grass will change direction because of our feelings. The land will entrance us and in the end bury us, with impartiality. If it seems to have great beauty, that is because of what we are, not because of what it is. The appetite for life goes over us and dies out much as the artist's appetite goes over the landscape and dies out. The landscape remains; and the pictures remain. The pictures I have discussed have altered the way we look at many places, and yet to look in an artist's place for his inspiration is all but pointless because his source is in his own mind. You could say that this book is pointless. Any account of how they were seen like that, and of how they were re-imagined, is not so much about places as about us. The birds have stopped singing in the lost lands. The unquiet country is you.'
  So ends Christopher Neve's Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting (1990), which is certainly one of the most extraordinary works of art history I've read. It is the fruit of a period in the author's life when he was able to meet and talk to a wide range of artists  who were essentially landscape painters (or the friends and associates of those already dead). Neve soon found that the best way to find the essence of their work was to talk about anything other than the paintings: there was 'a tacit agreement that talking about something else was the best possible way of saying anything worthwhile about the paintings without including them in the conversation directly. I strongly believe that if you have to say anything at all about pictures this is the best way to do it, though the best way of all is of course to remain silent.' This disarmingly modest, oblique approach results in a fascinating and highly original book. I think he overpraises some of his subjects, but he writes so beautifully and persuasively it hardly matters, and he has two rare qualities: he leaves himself out of the picture altogether (except in the brief Preface), and you never know what he's going to say next, or where it will come from. 
  The same cannot be said for another work of art history which I've been reading in tandem with Unquiet Landscape – the widely praised Thunderclap by Laura Cumming. Subtitled A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death, it is indeed as much about the author as about its art-historical subject, Dutch golden age art and, in particular, the mysterious genius Carel Fabritius (of Goldfinch fame). Suffice to say that I'm finding the art-historical stuff a good deal more compelling than the memoir: she writes well about the art and has some interesting insights not only into the paintings but into life in Holland in the seventeenth century. I'm enjoying Thunderclap well enough – especially finding out about Fabritius – but it does seem pretty ordinary after Unquiet Landscape. 
  Talking of the latter, I cannot resist one more quotation, from the opening section, 'The Landscape as Emotion': 
'Must we think of all landscape painting as subject to the often ludicrous esperanto of art history, or all landscape as designated national parks? Paintings are about feelings not rationality; about imagination not common sense. The best I can hope to do is to discuss some of the ideas that English landscape may have given rise to, and then leave it to you to look at the pictures*, testing them against what you know of life and death. The landscape commits suicide every day.'
 

* Easier said than done: at least in my paperback edition, many of the pictures discussed are not illustrated, and those that are are on a very small scale. The same can be said of many of the pictures discussed in Thunderclap.