Landscape and Specificity

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (1896-99)

Mark Strand, in his “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” (included in his 2000 essay collection The Weather of Words), said, “The reality of landscape has little to do with accuracy of depiction or representation.” He said that in seeing a landscape, “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with certain light or the look of a terrain.” He said that landscape painting “represents an escape from particularity.” 

Is he right? I don’t think so. The landscape paintings I admire brim with specificity. See, for example, the many inspired accuracies of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) – the shimmering areas “where the green of the pines shows against the blue of the sky,” “the parts of the ochre trunks where shadows outline and intermix,” “the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass” (I’m quoting here from John Updike’s wonderful description of Pines and Rocks in his Just Looking, 1989).

See also the exhaustive specifics of color and shape in Van Gogh’s The Plain of Auvers (1890).

Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890)

Look at what Van Gogh said about painting it:

I am totally absorbed by that immense plain covered with fields of wheat which extends beyond the hillside; it is wide as the sea, of a subtle yellow, a subtle tender green, with the subtle violet of a plowed and weeded patch and with neatly delineated green spots of potato fields in bloom. All this under a sky of delicate colors, blue and white and pink and purple. For the time being I am calm, almost too calm, thus in the proper state of mind to paint all that. [from Van Gogh’s letter to his mother, July, 1890]

Such words do not evince the sensibility of a generalist. Quite the opposite – they show an artist intent on capturing the subtlest qualities of the Auvers landscape.

One more example: Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650-51). 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51)

T. J. Clark, in his brilliant The Sight of Death (2006), says of it, “The details are exquisite and singular.” Details such as the two birches, of which Clark notes, 

Poussin has put a lot of effort separating the two birch trees and having the leaves of the right-hand one be closer to us, overlapping and partly obscuring the others, and certainly catching the light differently – catching it full on, seemingly, and reflecting more of it back. So that this tree is more a flimsy three-dimensional substance, to the other’s pure silhouette.

These are only three examples, but they’re sufficient, I submit, to cast doubt on Strand’s view. Far from escaping particularity, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Poussin immersed themselves in it.