As landscape is an integral part of our life we are seeing some of it’s uses and developments as used in artistic creativity. Early on light in landscape was often suggested by a symbolic means: in the Adoration of the Magi, 1321 by Gentile da Fabriano you get the sun as a golden disc, it’s lit by gold underpainting. In Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb, 1425 he painted thin gold rays radiating down to earth that are in the same fashion. But in the same work his direct observation of actual landscape led him to ignore hard outlines and crude blocks of colour and create a tonal landscape that does not have the rigidity  of earlier works to create an ethereal, melting effect that illustrates the absorbent unity that light can create, probably the first painting to do so. Van Eyk was from the Low Countries.

So a slightly -to our eyes- more realistic or natural landscape is starting to appear but it is still subservient to the main focus; a saint, a prophet, someone from the Bible, a recording of an important event, an episode from history or the classical world. What happened next? Well artists started to notice the elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water and the effects of these on the natural environment.

Water can mark the land in many ways when it’s in seas and rivers, winding streams, rain, fog, reflective lakes or blanketing snow.

Cloud shapes that can be lit and tinted by the sun can create other landscapes in the air and shadow the earth below. Perhaps the greatest gift to the artist is the merger of the intense light from the sun and our atmosphere that produces such a variety of effects and European painters have enjoyed the everchanging weather conditions that produce the most subtle nuances of luminosity. As Bo Jeffares says: “Daylight, hot and cold, delicate  dawn light, sleepy evening light, sunsets and sunrises, light om hazy autumn days or fresh spring ones and all the endless visual variations found in Europe are the mainstays of her landscape tradition.” Landscape artists use all these different kinds of light to set the emotional tone of a painting.

Van Eyck used light glowingly but there was another side to Northern painting which was sharp delineation, a linear clarity which indicates on-the-spot observation. Durer’s topographical views clearly indicate how the landscape of symbols was being gently eroded by other forms.

A big change started to happen in that as interest in landscape painting grew, the figures that had been so important figures got smaller and the landscape increased in proportion. This indicated a desire to look out on the world and to investigate it for it’s own sake. The landscape setting became every bit as important as the subject it contained and was now a complementary factor. Giovanni Bellini was a master of this approach. Have a look at his Madonna of the Meadow.

Each age sees what its beliefs enable it to see. .Renaissance artists became dissatisfied with the symbolic way of looking at nature in isolated units so they discovered new ways of questioning and looking more effectively and scientifically to help their work evolve. They wanted to see more realistically and more comprehensively’ Look at Leonardo da Vincis’ sketchbooks and Vesalius’ anatomical studies. To put it mildly things were buzzing back then!

The Italians were more governed by perspective as a definition of landscape, but this is only one way of creating an illusion of 3-D space on a 2-D surface.

Artists are always altering their ideas about their environment to fit in with the newest ideas of their time. We start off with the idea of the earthly paradise. This varies according to the nationality of the artist concerned and the places he/she was inspired by. But in it’s infancy there was a stylistic uniformity that came from a uniformity of beliefs, certainly in the western world, so you get the title International Gothic. In this first bit the movers and shakers are mostly from Italy.

The church’s idea was that one should treat nature symbolically, so things were seen as what they represented rather than what they were. This led to painters seeing things in isolation rather than cohesively, nature became a system of spiritual hieroglyphics. This was in an age where man was taught to aim for spiritual perfection disregarding his material life which was often seen as a complete distraction!

Early paintings, which are nearly always of a religious nature, nowadays seem naïve with their disproportionately sized people, angels , bushes, trees and flowers  but they were not meant to look natural as they had a narrative rather than an aesthetic meaning. In an age when most people were illiterate, the pictures told a biblical story. That’s what they were there for.

Take the representation of mountains which was highly archaic showing absolutely no evidence of observation at all but as a motif was used without change for a very long time. Indeed the Florentine painter Giotto who painted really expressive figure groups gave them plain, rocky backgrounds.

The first real landscapes come from Sienna. Ambrogio Lorensetti’s frescoes “Good and Bad Government” show factual details which are said to be a hundred years before their time and Simone Martini’s work shows a beautiful interpretation of nature.

In the Palace of the Popes at Avignon the wall decorations depict people enjoying the outdoor life showing a demand for rustic imagery in a great palace. This became an escapist obsession.

The landscape of Medieval Europe was not a welcoming place with a lot of it covered in Wild forests with their complements of wild boar and bandits. If you are beset by dangerous and even lethal nature you work hard to cultivate your own patch making it safe and giving you enough to feed your family. This led to the idea of the enclosed paradise garden. This was an edited image of a cottage garden where man’s control of nature ruled – plants laid out in ordered rows or forming patterns, possibly around a fountain, the garden fenced in by orderly hedges, palings or fences reminiscent of the stockades and battlements that had been and still were in places, essential for survival. Also at this time, the 1350s, every part of the painting is enriched and individual details are as finished as they could possibly be. This is reminiscent of the tapestries and jewellery of the period.

In the Middle Ages nature was seen as a source of food but also as the natural background to daily life. The gentry hawked and hunted for sport and the peasants tilled the land. These activities were recorded in the marvellous seasonal calendars called now Books of Hours made with objective clarity in the courts of France and Burgundy around 1400 but created by various artists from the Low Countries.

It’s said that your school days are the best days of ones’ life. Were yours? Think about it.

Mine were very peculiar to start off with, although you never think that way about things until well after they’ve happened!

I loved the village primary school – for an only child there were loads of benefits- other children to make friends with, playground games to get involved with and lots of things to learn. Everything was fun until I came back home saying words that I’d been taught in the playground that I thought were fun but which shocked my parents, neither of whom were narrow minded. I was 6 and on a very slippery slope…..

Ma and Pa decided I had to move school but to where? At just turned 6 and living in a village with limited transport links the first thought was boarding school, but there were two problems; I was too young and my parents couldn’t afford to send me. A few of their friends in the village were also unhappy at their offsprings command of foul language, so all the adults sat down one evening and decided what steps were going to be taken.

In the next village there was a small boys boarding prep school. It catered mainly for the children of parents who worked overseas but wanted to educate their sons in England. It also took a few local day pupils, boys of course and the occasional girl whose parents worked abroad and had placed their son there.

After consultation the school agreed to take 5 extra students – 2 girls and 3 boys. I’m sure that today with all the rules and regulations regarding education this would not have been allowed in any way. The school was in a beautiful Georgian manor house with superb grounds of mature trees with branches cascading to the ground – ideal for dens, grass and flowers. But it had been a family home. We had our classes in the old schoolroom,  boys and girls used the same loos even though there were some girl boarders and there was no distinction between the sexes when it came to sport. Everyone played rugby and cricket in the appropriate seasons. My Pa, an ex-club rugby and cricket player thoroughly approved.

We were taught all the normal stuff but not in the normal manner. Our teacher was a university educated Ethiopian, a beautiful, elegant man whom we were allowed to address as Dr. de Louis. His brain was as big as a planet and he always taught in his academic gown. It turned out that he was a cousin of Heille Selase and because he had another means of address, we kids reckoned that he was a spy! Although he really was a true academic, he made learning fun and interesting and we were allowed or taken into  areas that most kids of our age would never have got to in a normal school timetable. Sometimes we were driven to school but sometimes we all got up early and walked the two miles. In the summer, in the country it was bliss. I think, on reflection, I learned more in that time and still remember it, that in most phases of my schooling.

Nothing lasts forever. The school closed two years later leaving three sets of parents totally unwilling to send their kids back into mainstream education. Luckily there was a very recently retired primary school teacher in an neighbouring village who was willing basically to be a governess to us all. School would take place in the playroom in the house one set of parents. It was big enough for us five.

For a few years after the first foray into the foreign we stayed in England for our family holidays exploring Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, the south west and the south east coasts. Lots of architecture and art, loads of antique and bric-a-brac shops, and people to chat to about the history of places. And then……along came “Ben”!

Da had Ma’s present- the 3litre Bentley but he secretly hankered for a 4.5 litre one. To achieve this end and also to find the money to continue to restore the cottage and grounds, he had applied his interests  to restoring Vintage vehicles using them for a while and then finding a new home for them. One of his restored Rolls Royce’s had been sold to Micky Dolenz of the pop group the Monkees. He restored a 1921 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost wanting to keep it but was disappointed with the performance so sold it with a view to carpeting and re- curtaining the cottage, putting in central heating and seriously restoring a couple of fireplaces. But a friend of his mentioned that another friend had this Bentley to sell to save his marriage. The car had been rebuilt for competition and was a “Hooligan”.

We went to see the “Hooligan “. For Da it was love at first sight. “Ben” became part of our family and is now in his second generation of ownership.

There was one big problem…..”Ben” was a two-seater beetle-back and we were a family of three. No problem. “Ben” still has his original bum, but Da’s first act of ownership was to have a new bum made with an opening in it for a “tail end Charlie” seat installed for me and additional fold away mounts for access to the seat! Being inventive and cost conscious, the rear seat was a recycled mourner’s seat from the Silver Ghost Hearse that had partially bought “Ben”. I can still get into the seat even tho’ I am grown up.  It is still comfy.

Not only did Da make room for me, but he also made me useful on journeys by installing a curved Perspex screen. It kept the wind away and was big enough to have a map open in front of me, so I became family map reader. The raised position helped too. Basically, I was just yelling Right, Left and Straight On to Da and amazingly things didn’t go wrong

So “Ben’s” first adventure was motoring through France, popping into Switzerland and down to the Black Forest area of Germany. This time we were booked out and back on a ferry.

Second problem….. “Ben” had no hood. Solution- the biggest golf umbrella you could buy! If it rained we stopped and put up the umbrella. Da had pre-booked some accommodation but was still relying on finding auberges when dusk fell as we had no idea of what mileage we would be covering in a day. (At this time French roads were very poor and you couldn’t guarantee a daily mileage.)

We had bought a camping stove, kettle and teapot to provide a good cuppa if/when needed and were headed for the smallest walled town in France-it’s called Nozeroy and is quite a bit above sea level. We didn’t need the umbrella, and I got the best tan I’ve ever had. The auberges were more comfortable and the food was lovely. There were lots of encounters with people who were interested in the car and the passengers. Coming into Chambery at dusk one evening we passed a nun on a bicycle who stopped when she saw us parked at an auberge. She said to Da that she thought that “Ben” was an aeroplane!

Some of the roads were a bit scary on the way up to Nozeroy but we got there and parked in front of the Hotel. Next morning we were greeted by a very excited French lady who asked in English was this really a Bentley and were we English. This began a lifelong friendship and as a family we have stayed in touch with Martine and Raoul, a vet, who got Da into going with him to help birth calves after an early breakfast of cheese and wine. Though Nozeroy is a lovely place it was very damp, and Martine and Raoul suffered with arthritic symptoms. They gradually work-hopped through several warmer areas and ended up just outside Marseilles where Raoul and Martine worked as a twosome testing racehorses for drugs also going to Corsica for the races there where they were a very popular couple.

Switzerland came over as an extraordinarily well organised and fearfully tidy country. The Swiss were rather perplexed by “Ben” as were the Germans who thought that Da was German.  I don’t think that either expected to see a child navigator.

In all we covered close on 3500 miles on this adventure and didn’t get wet once.

Recently we took “Ben” back to France for the Dieppe Retro which allows cars of the right vintage from all over. I wasn’t navigating this time as we were in a procession escorted by police vehicles and even breakdown trucks. “Ben” thought poorly of this as he has never broken down on our watch! The procession took in a lot of the D-Day landing sites, some very pretty little towns and villages and an incredible number of stops for aperitifs which the police escort quaffed without concern. Pickled is a good word to describe that adventure, and again we didn’t get wet once.

Over the years we have had lots of adventures with “Ben” who is a much-loved member of our Family. However, the most quirky ones were the earlier ones as people, at least in Britain seem to have got much more used to vintage and classic vehicles. And I don’t get into scrapes anymore (much)…..