There are those who think that to live in a remote place in the north is to live inevitably with an absence, with starkness and dearth, with the want and lack of most of the things that give sustenance and pleasure. This can be disconcerting, but it can be more disconcerting still to be praised for endurances neither practised nor felt. When autumn draws towards its inevitable end, how best to respond to the assumption that I am one ‘Before whom winter opens like a grave’?1

The response has to be to raise a series of questions: questions of perspective, of standpoint, and of willingness to accept the realities of northern things as they are. But there is far more depth to acceptance than enduring that which cannot be altered: the kind of acceptance which is made up of affirmation and delight is necessary as a precondition of living contentedly and creatively with the realities of things, northern or southern. John Ash’s lines

But if you don’t, on most days, love the place you live in,

as if it was the only place on earth, you had better get out2

have an unanswerable wisdom which is mostly practical. Beyond this there is a specific, perhaps unexpected, sustenance to be drawn from the very fugacity of northern light and northern weather, comparable to the sustaining peace of what Louis MacNeice called ‘The necessity of the silence of the islands’.3

An education, or self-education, in the aesthetics of remoteness and north has to go beyond widely appreciated tranquilities and beauties – as of mountain slopes seen by the first sunlight of a morning in high summer – and learn to encompass fine shades and shadows in the realisation that fog and rain, cold and early dark can also be subjects for celebration. All seasons of the north can be appreciated if the response to them is a measured one. It is possible to learn from the Scandinavian painters of the early twentieth century to appreciate the beauty and repose of long winter evenings in lamplight. To learn from the Scottish painters of the mid-twentieth century fine discriminations between nuances of grey in a stonewalled landscape under an overcast sky. To learn from the English painters and printmakers of the early nineteenth century the beauty of light diffused through mist which is the essence of the first brightening days of the northern spring. Or to learn from the contemporary poet Sean O’Brien, that an urban walk after the early night of November has fallen can be a delight in itself, if approached with the heightened awareness of the particular beauty of place and time, what he calls a ‘Novembrist’ sensibility, ‘gaberdined / against the fog, but part of it’, moving through ‘dank austerity and blessed peace.’4 An industrial city under fog is not widely perceived as a potential source of aesthetic pleasure, but the Manchester paintings of Adolphe Valette (1876–1942) also open our eyes to the recession of Victorian monumental buildings in diffused light, gradations of colour as subtle as those of the fading blues of mountain distances.

It is an important part of any consideration of aesthetics of the north to be open to all the seasons of the northern year, to urban as well as rural experience, not just to the places and seasons of August hillwalking and winter climbing, those seasons in which the north was conventionally visited for pleasure. This is one of two historical factors which complicate the appreciation of the aesthetics of the north: it is seen as a place to visit, not as a place in which to dwell. Also, in long history, north is seen as intrinsically inferior, in climate and inheritance, to the classical lands of the Mediterranean.

It is useful to trace the apprehension of the north as a place of dearth and lack back through history, especially visual history. There is a specific British history of the depiction of the north and the south which celebrates the south as a place to live, parts of the north as places to visit. The art of place in the nineteenth-century Britain polarised north and south: the tradition of visionary landscape which arose in the early nineteenth century focused intensely on the south, to the point where English place is sometimes simply read as southern place. Samuel Palmer’s great elms with stars tangled in their branches, the steep combes sheltering pastures and cornfields, all seen by the light of summer sunrise or harvest moon, are intensely of the south. So are the woodland manors, cornfields and slow rivers of the Pre-Raphaelites. William Morris established the old stone houses and water meadows of the upper Thames as one epitome of England.

In contrast, the depiction of the British north in the visual arts was for a long time seen from outside, from the perspective of the picturesque tourist or sportsman. There is indeed a whole sub-group of specialist depictions of Scottish moors and mountains as the masculine theatre of game shooting, deer stalking or climbing – the Highland landscapes by Landseer or McCulloch which decorated the ‘August houses’ of the years before the wars – which became fixed in popular apprehension as the true image of Scotland.

The image of the north of England is more complex, because so much changed and evolved in northern England in the course of the nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, beauties of the Lakeland mountains were seen, sketched, and aquatinted on summer tours.5 The way that these peaks and blue distances are handled is still haunted by remembered depictions of the Apennines and, surprisingly often, this landscape is shown as unpeopled. It is fine, even haunting, but ‘summer tour’ defines the attitude of a traveller to the northern landscape. Shooting season in Scotland; sketching season in Cumberland or north Wales.

Depiction of the industrial cities of the north is much more complex. The early stages of industrial development on a modest scale were simply depicted by the picturesque conventions of the day, but in the mid-nineteenth century the expanding industrial cities established themselves as a distinct visual phenomenon, at a time when much high art was seeking to escape from industrialised reality into the shadows of historicist fantasy. It remained to the marginal, self-taught Leeds painter Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) to invent a new, intensely Victorian poetry of these newly developed places. He painted cobbles and the stone garden walls of mill-owners’ villas on the ridges above the northern cities. His depictions of wet streets, falling autumn light, distant lighted windows, moonlight on deserted lanes, have acquired in retrospect a kind of ghostly authority.

Fog is crucial to visual imaginings of England in the twentieth century.6 Watery air, mists and exhalations: church spires in the willowy distances of the fens; Midland canals and dripping trees. Adolphe Valette became the virtuoso painter of fog, to the extent that Grimshaw had been the virtuoso of evening and moonlight, making a link to the misty, problematic townscapes of Lowry and to other twentieth-century depictions of the northern cities.

Urban melancholy and romance characterise the northern images made by the 1930s documentary photographers Bill Brandt and Humphrey Spender, following Valette consciously or unconsciously: fog-white sky stretches over the industrial cities and their football grounds where the far goal is obscured in mist, the poetry of smoke and cold. (An epilogue to this tradition is found in Fay Godwin’s photographs published in the 1970s in Remains of Elmet, which render the industrial north as ‘a sunless, depopulated Siberia’.7)

The inclusions and omissions of the influential Shell Guides series in the 1930s are indicative, as this enterprise, in which many distinguished artists of the period participated, constituted an attempt to define an aesthetic geography of Britain. The series includes Wales, but all the English counties are southern, Midland or western, with the sole exception pre-war of Northumberland and Durham by Thomas Sharp (1937). After the war Sharp’s Northumberland was reissued in 1954 and 1969, and County Durham was rewritten by Henry Thorold in 1980. There is no volume for Yorkshire or Lancashire and, astonishingly, no volumes for Cumberland or Westmoreland. There was only one Scottish volume, a guide to the west coast of the Highlands by Stephen Bone (1938 and 1952) – a choice which in essence follows the mapping of the Victorian landscape painters.8

Beyond Britain, in the general histories of European visual and literary culture, there has been a fundamental assumption that civilisation is focused on the Mediterranean, and that the Mediterranean of antiquity provides a standard against which all cultural latecomers must be judged. This assumption underlies the whole phenomenon of the Grand Tour, which led educated and wealthy northerners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Italy and especially to Rome. There, amidst the ruins of the antiquity which had been the focus of their educations, they could buy works by the admired painters of the Renaissance and Baroque, or commission works from artists from every European nation, who made their way to Rome as academy and trading centre. The very wealthy and determined could also take excavated and restored classical sculpture north with them.

From this comes a complex of aesthetic phenomena in northern Europe, all of which in one way or another are attempts to create the south in the north. This is attended by a nexus of aspirations and perspectives which might be described as a series of attempts to recreate an Arcadia, or a pastoral and classical ‘golden world’. This can be traced in classicising depictions of northern landscape, in Palladian and neo-Roman architectures and in the shaping of great gardens in imitation of the admired landscape paintings of Poussin and Claude.

One finished expression of this nexus of aspirations is the view from the library at Holkham Hall. A gallery of Italian marbles is behind you, and a Venetian window frames a long lake and willows in such as way that certain summer lights create an illusion of the Veneto in north Norfolk. Eighteenth-century landscape paintings flooded northern valleys with the southern light learned in the studios and galleries of Rome. Marble altars and classical ruins were placed at the ends of dripping avenues of northern trees. These phenomena, while they have a beauty and presence of their own (and a paradoxical, universal influence on the subsequent aesthetics of Europe) represent an attempt to superimpose an aspiration on a reality, and express an intrinsic dissatisfaction with the present and the real. The main stream of the attempt ended with the Napoleonic wars: the nineteenth century exploded into fragmented and mutually-hostile historicisms and nationalisms in the arts.

The northern nostalgia for a southern elsewhere, the whole long tradition articulated in Goethe’s longing for the scent of lemon flowers and the sight of oranges glowing in the green shadow of their leaves, finds a very late, culminating expression in Rex Whistler’s haunting mural of an imaginary seascape with towns and islands (a poetic translation and transformation of the Menai Strait outside the windows) at Plas Newydd on Anglesey. This, the last great manifestation of the south in the north, was finished in 1938, in the summer before the Munich crisis.

However, a quiet counter-example of northern depictions of northern reality existed from the seventeenth century onwards, in Dutch painting: in the lifting rainclouds and dimmed reflections in Vermeer’s celebrated View of Delft;9 in the snowy fog and winter dark in Averkamp; in all the clouded skies and wind-blown waves in van Goyen. These are paintings which focus for the first time in Europe on the quotidian reality of a northern climate, as central subject matter in itself, rather than as the setting for Biblical events in contemporary northern dress.

Before the turn of the nineteenth century, Henry Raeburn in Edinburgh depicted the colours of northern landscapes as precisely as any Dutch master in the backgrounds of his portraits, although the landscapes themselves are sometimes reconstructions from sketches by others of places which he had never seen. Later Scottish painters of carefully observed quotidian landscapes, especially Sir George Reid (1841-1913), learned crucial lessons from the art academies of the Netherlands. Freed from the domination of shooting-lodge Highland landscapes produced by Landseer and his contemporaries, they depicted Scottish farmland and its red-tiled steadings, working landscape, the realities of the passing seasons.10

But the further north of Europe – Baltic Germany and Scandinavia – did not find its own image in the visual arts until the turn of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, these northernmost landscapes are routinely lit by Italian light under imaginary Mediterranean skies. They have to wait until the opening years of the nineteenth century for the depiction of their dark afternoons, slow evenings, lucent midnights. Danish painters of the early nineteenth century looked back to the Dutch example, to the realities of life in and around Copenhagen, to ‘the weather in the streets’, but the real discoveries and transformations in the depiction of the north came from the former Swedish territories in Baltic Germany.

Until that time of discovery, the dominating Mediterranean tradition, as found in the much-admired works of Claude and Poussin and their long posterity of followers, had focused upon abundance, rich depths of land and waters, the lastingness of things lit by a constant summer light, often by the dusty golden light of late afternoon. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, northern art, on the other hand, found at last the value of that which is fugitive, lit by moving light, by constantly changing light. It came also to focus on seasons infinitely more distinct than those of the south. Minutiae of change in the year become crucial subjects for northern painting: there may only be four days in a year when birch trees are in pale-green leaf with a cloud of their pollen hanging above them in the air. There may only be three days on either side of the spring or autumn equinox when a ray of light shoots through a house from west to east. Only a week, or less, when black newly thawed water flows between banks of still-frozen snow.

For every painting of ‘high-builded cloud / Moving at summer’s pace’,11 there is an autumnal or wintery equivalent to be found within this characteristically northern aesthetic of fugacity. One example would be Caspar David Friedrich’s extraordinary scrub bushes in chill mist, a barely shaped fragment of the life we know, but inconclusive, poignant in its lateness, in the light which dies even as the hand attempts to catch its likeness.12

There are other specifics of the aesthetic of European north, one of the most distinctive being what might be identified as the visual representation of ‘the homeward journey’. In the south of Europe, window grilles and shutters close off the ground level which is often, at least in the older towns, storage and shops. The rooms above, if they are seen lit at all in the hour of the passeggiata, are only seen at an angle which precludes a view of anything but the ceiling, sometimes wonderfully and richly painted as it is in the older and larger houses, but you never see those upstairs rooms from floor level. The lives inside remain hidden.

This is the opposite of how a northern city appears at winter dusk, that time which Sean O’Brien calls ‘evening-afternoon’13 Part of the aesthetic of the homeward journey is to see lives in lighted windows, from the street, from the train. Or to see up into first-floor drawing rooms in Edinburgh, or in the stock brick streets of London from the top deck of the bus – travelling through the cold dusk towards your own home via the sight of so many other households beginning their evenings. In some parts of northern Europe there is a social convention that curtains are not drawn at this time, so that any walk home from work along a street in the Netherlands is a walk past households sitting at round tables with the hanging lamps above them.

This idea is central to the reality represented by the Scottish painters of the early twentieth century: Glasgow or Edinburgh by autumn rainlight. Darkening rooms, glimpses into the streets through windows dashed silver by rain. Slate roofs in westerly light. Rooms filled with regrets and evenings, rain and time passing. Shadowed rooms full of the scents of chrysanthemums and wet leaves. The sound of the rain at the windows, of a piano two houses away, traffic on wet tarmac, distant ships, the railway close at hand. A woman closes her book as the first light goes on in the opposite house. Ragged winter splendour in the western sky over chimneys and church towers; summer flowering of elders and chestnuts over stone garden walls in the lanes. Across the rivers, away to the north lie bare slopes in twilight, territories of lucid grey, mist coming down on sandstone and distance.

If there is a single image (painted, recollected or imagined) which distils the aesthetic of the remoter, rural north, it is that of the lighted window seen from a distance, especially when afternoon is dimmed by mist or rain. Or the long prospect downwards to the lights of an isolated village. Or lights of a coastal town seen across darkening water. I remember, decades ago, travelling eastwards out of Wales and through Herefordshire in February, the landscape on either side of the quiet road softened to monochrome by fog. The only colour was the diffused yellow of far lights coming on in scattered farmhouses amidst the dimmed fields.

Lighted windows at a distance are the subject of many Japanese woodblock prints, a tradition extraordinarily rich in images of evening. From the time of the introduction of synthetic Prussian Blue to Japan in the nineteenth century, the visual poetry of sparse lanterns in rain or failing light, already very much part of Japanese aesthetic traditions, could be realised in full. One such image is Kawase Hasui’s woodblock print ‘Omori Beach’,14 depicted at nightfall with sparse, lighted windows sending thin trails of reflection across darkening water. Or the moment fixed in words by Jun’ichir Tanizaki, when he observes the quotidian elegance of

The lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse [ … ] seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the windows of a train.15

This profound tradition of appreciation of an aesthetic of remoteness, simplicity and northern weather alerts us to the real sympathy which links Japanese aesthetic theory and the art and experience of the European north. Indeed, there is much in Japanese aesthetics (as accessible to Western readers, at any rate) which seems clearly relevant to the aesthetics of remoteness and the north, indeed more generally to the formation of a positive northern aesthetic in Europe.

A central Japanese tenet is to live with the realities of season and climate: Jun’ichir Tanizaki wrote in his aesthetic text In Praise of Shadows:

The idea of embracing shadows, of ‘guid[ing] shadows towards beauty’s ends’ is of the highest relevance to a creative enjoyment of northern Europe, and a clear statement of the intentions and effects of many of the arts, verbal and visual, of northern European countries.

Donald Richie’s discussion of Japanese aesthetics suggests there is a more general sympathy between Japanese aesthetic thought and the experience and arts of the European north:

much less common among the qualities that can be derived from the assumptions of traditional Japanese aesthetics, Donald Keene has distinguished suggestion, irregularity, simplicity and perishability [ … ] Western aesthetics is sometimes familiar with simplicity, asymmetry, and suggestion, but the idea that beauty lies in its own vanishing is an idea much less common. Perishability remains, however, what Keene has called ‘the most distinctly Japanese aesthetic ideal’.

Richie further defines the crucial aesthetic term mono no aware as

a slightly sweet and sad quality as appreciated by an observer sensitive to the ephemeral nature of existence; ‘the pity of things’17

This very focus on fugacity, the appreciation of season or light or epoch, even as they change, is essential to the European north:

Whaur yon broken brig hings owre;

Whaur yon water maks nae soun’;

Babylon blaws by in stour

Gang doun wi’ a sang, gang doun.18

Here the mid-twentieth-century Scots poet William Soutar offers a perfectly poised celebration of the fugacity of all things except (paradoxically) the song itself. His verses position the poet in solitude, in a place eloquent of the broken structures of earlier times, in the conditions which produce the aesthetic sensation called sabi in Japan.

Melancholy (an unstable term which has changed its meaning radically over the European centuries) is one of the pleasures of the north, the appreciation of that which is beautiful even as it changes or disappears, the sense that northern conditions make the passage of time acutely apprehensible. But longing or nostalgia, in this sense, is fruitfully identified with the Japanese term sabi, and implies an acceptance of the realities of age and the past, remoteness, sombre weather; the acceptance that it can sometimes be right and appropriate to be alone in the landscape or the evening city, giving serious thought to the realities of time and season in a life. This is wholly distinct from the paralysis of depression, a condition which blocks and freezes.20 Many of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings, exemplary works of northern European art, exist in the still contemplation of the moment even as it passes, the preservation in paint of moments of urban domestic solitude, in dimmed, sparsely furnished private rooms, things until that time hardly thought worthy of record; in every sense invisible things.

There is one last term of Japanese aesthetics which clarifies much of the art of the European north: wabi is defined as ‘a cultivated aesthetic that finds beauty in simplicity and an impoverished rusticity’21 Cotman’s watercolours of patched-up gates in monastery ruins, such as The Gateway of Kirkham Priory,22 or his etchings of unrestored and shabby country churches, work entirely within this aesthetic. In the twentieth century, Eric Ravilious’s watercolours of simple agricultural machinery, or of abandoned vehicles, do the same. The Waterwheel,23 with its improvised generator in a disregarded spinney of thin trees on an overcast winter day (the sort of place axiomatically overlooked by high art, indeed by almost all Western art), is an English manifestation of this aesthetic phenomenon, as is the same artist’s Downs in Winter.24 This places a rusted agricultural roller in a near-monochrome landscape over which the rain is setting in – late winter and coming on to rain is one characteristic season of Ravilious’s work. His landscapes are sparsely populated, remote but agricultural; the things in them are often homemade, or re-used, or in decay.

Although now firmly established, for some time after Ravilious’s death his reputation lay in popular appreciation, to some degree moved by the sentiment of recognition, rather than in more official critical acceptance.25 Much the same could be said of the reputation of the great early nineteenth-century painter of the northern European landscape, Caspar David Friedrich, almost forgotten for half a century after his death. Friedrich is above all a painter of changing light and changing season, of the mutability and fugacity of the north, at the same time that he transforms the symbolic and metaphysical potential of landscape. His paintings of remote, unremarkable places in failing light correspond closely to the aesthetic of wabi, as do Cotman’s experimental paintings from his northern tour of 1805, the summer which produced the celebrated Greta Bridge, and his exceptional exploratory watercolours made on the River Greta and in Rokeby Park, records of places off the paths and roads. There is much in common between Friedrich’s Trees and Branches in the Snow26 and Cotman’s studies of tangled undergrowth, of branches washed up on river-beaches, such as On the Greta near Rokeby.27 Almost simultaneously, but unknown to each other, they pioneered an aesthetic which schools the eye and heart for the experience of living in the north: the offering of intense regard to things disregarded, apprehension of late summer light, apprehension of the colours of frozen twilights. Above all, they observed, recorded and transformed the change of the seasons in unfrequented places.

This quality of observed fugacity, following a light which is always changing, a climate which is always moving and developing, is essential to the realities of the north. Depiction in northern art itself becomes a part of the whole unstill process which drives successions of clouds, seasons and weathers across the flanks of the hills. To contemplate, appreciate and apprehend the aesthetic of the north, especially the remote north, is to celebrate, and participate in, its mutability. Nightfall overtakes the describing hand, and the walk home lies through the dark.

1 Sean O’Brien, from his poem ‘Grimshaw’, The Drowned Book (London: Picador, 2007), p. 66.

2 John Ash, Two books: The Anatolikon / To the City (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 127.

3 Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Faber, 1979), p. 62.

4 Sean O’Brien, from ‘Novembrists’, November (London: Picador, 2011), pp.30–32.

5 John R. Murray, A Tour of the English Lakes (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011) is a detailed study of a fine example.

6 It could be claimed that Caspar David Friedrich was the first painter to master the depiction of fog in all its variety. Cf. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 112.

7 Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin, Remains of Elmet (London: Faber, 1979); the matchless description of it is Judith Willson’s.

8 There were post-war one-volume treatments of both Scotland and Ireland.

9 1660–61, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

10 This whole section is greatly indebted to my friend and colleague John Morrison and to his comprehensive knowledge and understanding of Scottish art.

11 Philip Larkin, ‘Cut Grass’, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1988), p.183.

12 See the superb discussion of belatedness in the art of Caspar David Friedrich in Koerner, op. cit. (see n. 6 above), investigating the way in which Friedrich’s art, and particularly his use of the Rückenfigur, positions you, the viewer, as belated: ‘you are afterwards’, pp. 269, 291.

13 O’Brien, November, p. 36.

14 Hasui lived 1883–1957; the print is part of his Twenty Views of Tokyo, 1930.

15 Jun’ichir Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 6.

16 Ibid., p. 29.

17 Donald Ritchie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007), pp. 18, 72–3.

18 William Soutar, ‘Song’, The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. John MacQueen and Tom Scott (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 515.

19 Ritchie, A Tractate, p. 44.

20 The accursed wanderers of romantic literature, moving restlessly over the earth, achieving nothing, imprisoned in the moment when they were cursed or when they left the place which expelled them, are blighted by the repetitions of depression, not enlightened or moved by longing.

21 Ritchie, A Tractate, p. 73.

22 1805, York Art Gallery.

23 1938, Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery; Alan Powers, Imagined Realities (London: Imperial War Museum / Philip Wilson, 2003), plate 47.

24 1934, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; Powers, Imagined Realities, plate 49.

25 Mutatis mutandis, and to different degrees, the same is broadly true of the reputations of two other painters of the industrial north of England, Lowry and Grimshaw, whose works elicited a powerful popular response, contemporary with critical indifference or hostility.

26 1828, Dresden. For a virtuoso discussion of this painting see Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, pp. 9–12, 291–2.

27 1805, Tate Britain. See David Hill, Cotman in the North (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 108–9.