Japanese artist Hiroshige and fireworks in art

The great Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) is currently featured in an exhibition at the British Museum entitled 'Artist of the Open Road', which includes one of the pictures I used in my book A History of Fireworks from their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion Books) in the chapter on fireworks in the arts.

Entitled Fireworks over Ryogoku Bridge (1858), it is a woodblock print showing a display at the famous bridge built in the seventeenth century over the Sumida River in Tokyo. The area remains a popular venue for pyrotechnics to this day, and there is also a fireworks museum. 

Not featured in the exhibition, but included in my book is another of Hiroshige's prints Enjoying the Fireworks and the Cool of the Evening at Ryogoku Bridge (c. 1847). This work concentrates on the audience rather than the fireworks.

Although there are many fine pictures of fireworks from famous painters such as Turner, Whistler and Joseph Wright, quite a few artists have found the audience as interesting as the spectacle. As early as 1579, Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla’s depiction of the celebrated Castel Sant’Angelo display in Rome shows a rather blasé crowd. Although they are so small in the frame to be almost a detail, on close examination they seem to be chatting among themselves rather than taking in the great events in the sky.

While in Fire-Works on the Night of the Fourth of July (1868) by the American artist Winslow Homer, the fireworks are incidental and our eye is drawn to the toff in the foreground, whose hat is being hit by a falling rocket

This is the link for the exhibition - https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hiroshige-artist-open-road?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22446594171&gbraid=0AAAAADPXika-SUY2YYg-fnS52S2BwTZU-&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIj92kspndjgMViplQBh187xnjEAAYASAAEgJp0vD_BwE

Thomas Cole: painter of storms

The nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole of the Hudson Valley School is not much known in this country, but now he has an exhibition devoted to his work at the National Gallery in London. 

Cole was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1801, emigrating to the US in 1818. From 1825, he lived in the lovely Catskill Mountains of New York State until shortly before his death in 1848. The Catskills has plenty of wild weather, and that led me to feature his work in my book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion).

In 1835, he painted a tornado in the Catskills in a pretty straightforward, naturalistic way (picture 3) but he was also interested in storms as a metaphor, so in the final picture of his series, The Course of Empire (picture 2) a glowering vortex of storm clouds gather over a city as it is destroyed. Cole noted: ‘A savage enemy has entered the city. A fierce tempest is raging.’ In a related (free) exhibition at the National Gallery, the contemporary American artist Ed Ruscha offers his own take on the same theme.

Similarly in Cole's Voyage of Life series from 1842, Childhood and Youth have calm skies, while Manhood is tempestuous (picture 1)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Storm-Nature-Culture-John-Withington/dp/1780236611

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/thomas-cole-eden-to-empire

'Storm: Nature and Culture': new reviews

Here's another review of Storm. This time from the Church Times.

I've also had this review from an Indian environmental website:- http://www.downtoearth.org.in/reviews/storm-front-57277?platform=hootsuite

Storms in art

The only seascape painted by the great Rembrandt is Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633). It shows Christ being calmness itself while his disciples panic, and one throws up over the side. Or perhaps that should be ‘showed’ as the painting was stolen from Boston in 1990 and has not been seen since.

At about the time Rembrandt was at work, landscape painting was emerging for the first time as a respected genre, The great French master Nicolas Poussin quickly latched on to the spectacle provided by a storm in his Landscape During a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) with its trees bending in the fierce wind and its sky riven by lightning.

Poussin took a story from ancient Babylon, but during the seventeenth century, Dutch painters such as Ludolf Bakhuizen began to create naturalistic contemporary storm scenes, often with a hint of blue sky to demonstrate the wild weather was a temporary phenomenon and that order would soon be restored.

But by the end of the eighteenth century, a darker mood was emerging with painters such as the Frenchman Claude-Joseph Vernet painting tiny human figures striking anguished poses as a tempest rages around them. Like the great British depicter of storms, Turner, Vernet was said to have once had himself lashed to the mast of a ship in a tempest in the interests of research.

For more on storms in art, films, literature and religion, the worst storms of all time, and how storms have changed the course of history, see my new book, Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion). 

Painting the frozen North

At the moment, I'm writing a book about storms, so I was lured into London's National Gallery to see an exhibition of paintings by the 19th century Norwegian artist, Peder Balke, of his country's wild and windy Arctic regions.

In the spring of 1832, Balke sailed along the coast of Norway, right up to the North Cape, and drew on what he saw there for inspiration and subject matter for the rest of his life. He was not particularly successful, and soon turned away from painting to property development and left-wing politics.

Still the exhibition, which is free, is an interesting portrayal of places seldom seen in paintings. Personally, I felt his moonlight scenes worked better than his daylight works, though he had a disconcerting habit of putting a rowing boat in an identical position in a number of his compositions. The exhibition also has some atmospheric depictions of mountains looming out of mist.

Many of the pictures have never been exhibited before in the UK, and the exhibition runs until April 12.

*This article on heatwaves quotes from my Disastrous History of the World.  http://roadtoinsure.com/heat-record-setting-heat-waves-history/  

Floods in art

Floods are the natural disaster most commonly suffered by humanity, so it is not surprising that they have so often proved an inspiration for painters. Noah’s flood, for example, was one of the first subjects in Christian art, portrayed on the walls of the catacombs beneath Rome from as early as the third century (above).

It has been depicted by artists as diverse as Michelangelo, Raphael, Breughel, Poussin, Turner, Géricault, Millais, Dali, Chagall, and David LaChapelle. Other flood myths, such as the ancient Greek story of Deucalion also attracted artists like Tintoretto.

What attracted the Impressionists to floods was how the changed landscape gave them a new opportunity to investigate the fleeting effects of light. When Port-Marly on the Seine was inundated in the spring of 1876, Sisley painted it seven times, and Monet and Camille Pissarro also executed multiple takes on real floods.

Worries about global warming have stimulated the imaginations of modern artists, with illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones composing London as Venice in which Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament have become islands in a lake, while the British graffiti artist Banksy painted the slogan: ‘I don’t believe in global warming’ on a wall above a London canal in such a way that the letters seemed to be disappearing beneath the water.

*The full story appears in my new book, Flood: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books ISBN 978 1 78023 196 9) which also includes chapters on how floods have been portrayed in literature and films, on the flood myths that appear in dozens of religions, on history’s deadliest floods, on how some of the most ambitious structures ever built have been erected in an effort to combat flooding, and on the impact that climate change may have on humanity’s attempts to fight floods in the future.

** Here I am being interviewed about floods by BBC Radio Humberside - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDrkPEVsz2o