Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  That hint of sacred revelation, too, may well have come from Blake. His new way of ‘illuminated printing’ – engraving text and pictures on the copper, melting the background away with aqua fortis, then painting the relief engraving in watercolour thickened with chalk – had, for him, a singular importance. This was ‘printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’. The infinite meant, for him, everything that might be seen once man’s perception was cleansed. Infernal methods were those used by devils, who in his cosmology were revolutionary, iconoclastic and wise. To catch light, violence might be necessary: either corroding copper or, when etching directly on the plate, digging and gouging, as he had done when scraping light with the burin out of hard-grained wood. To catch a stream in moonlight, tears on a cheek, sun diamonding the waves, his advice was ‘Etch the whites & bite it in’ – beginning, and stabbing deepest, to bring out the point or focus of light on every single object.

  That focus was the cause of my own first conscious struggle with light. I was eight, and with my new Christmas present of Faber pencils in their green cardboard case – the lid prettily decorated with a girl in Bavarian dress – I had decided to draw a still life of a bowl of apples and a glass of wine. I did not copy them, since wine was never seen at home in my childhood, save the sticky, mellow bottle of ten-years-in-the-sideboard sherry that was produced on grand occasions. The montage simply appeared in my mind, grandly framed by curtains. Lying on the floor near the fire in my grandparents’ house, snow banked outside the windows, I pressed my sharp new pencils as firmly as I dared into a piece of pristine white card. A very hard line seemed essential to the enterprise. I was careful to leave, though, some points of shine on the apples and lustre on the glass; these were clearly, I realised, the life of the thing, and had to be as bright as possible. But as the rest of the picture grew steadily darker with vigorous 2B strokes, the precious white spots I had reserved were constantly smudged by my hand, and had to be rubbed clean again with the corner of my smallest eraser. It was a continuous effort to rescue light from the grubbiness, haul it up again and buttress it safely with deep, dark lines, until I felt wearier with drawing than I had ever been. My picture won a prize, though, of a green mapping pen with a beautifully fine curved nib, like a little claw; and with that I learned to scratch light out of black boards in which, far from bullying and smudging, it seemed to lie dormant, and delicate, and quiet.

  This was quite out of character, however. Light was the swiftest, subtlest thing there was, ‘instantly here and instantly among the stars’, as it seemed to William of Conches in the twelfth century.14 In the outer regions of Paradise, as Dante reported, even the lux perpetua shivered and swarmed with angels, who were all light. Perhaps light, then, really was entirely angels, good and bad, as some of his contemporaries claimed. Dante saw light so living that it quivered as he looked on it, and flashed with frequent lightning before it spoke. And this was within the eternal shrine of heaven, where light was presumed to be virtually at rest.

  In everyday life it often sprang from friction and agitation. Newton listed the many ways light broke out: from seawater fretted in a storm, the rubbed back of a cat or the neck of a horse, steel struck with a flint, amber struck with a stone, axletrees igniting in a chariot race. A glass globe, rotated very fast, shone against his palm and made his finger ‘lucid like a Glow-worm’. These effects lasted a mere ‘second of time’, uncatchable and uncontrollable. Hopkins sparked light unintentionally as he took off his thick wool jersey in the dark, ‘with an accidental stroke of my finger down the stuff’; Coleridge claimed to have tried the cat experiment, to see if the fur-sparks were refrangible through a prism, and come away covered in scratches.

  Even in still life, light was not still. On the painted walls of Pompeii it was a burglar in the kitchen, tumbling the apples and ruffling the breasts of the shut-eyed hanging birds. Closer inspection showed it was often scribbled or stippled on, as though it scratched objects like a vengeful child. In Caravaggio’s table scenes, among the vessels and grapes and mocking looks of brown-skinned boys, light roamed like a wolf, where it would, when it would. The most luminous compositions by painters of Newton’s day – Spanish lemons on a pewter plate or Dutch tulips, beaded with dew, thronging a vase – featured light as an agitator, about to break out, throw china, fling the flowers aside.

  Catching light in such passing ‘fits’ was bound to be frustrating. At one point Claude Monet, painting in London in 1900, had fifteen canvases set up simultaneously to snare chill, windy March light in sunshine, mist and rain showers.15 He worked ‘in a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water … God, it was beautiful … One marvel after another, each lasting less than five minutes, it was enough to drive one mad.’ Turner began to scan these transient wonders as a boy, lying on his back on Hampstead Heath, studying the changes of sun, shade and atmosphere for hours together, before running home to dingy Covent Garden to paint them. Running was not just a boy’s exuberance, but light’s imperative. A burst of sunshine so beckoned Ravilious once, as he sought a pitch to paint the chalk figure of the Cerne Abbas giant, that ‘I took a 5 bar gate a bit close and all but cut my breeches in two on a prong of barbed wire’. It was reminiscent of Coleridge on his first visit to Wordsworth in 1797, leaping over a wall on sighting him to reach his inspiration faster.

  Out of doors, light tangled in things: stacked up in clouds, sowed confusion in leaves and water and hung, as if impaled, on tower, spire or tree. It sometimes seemed to pause long enough – lie smoothly enough on that field, that slope – to beguile Ravilious into racing out, setting up the board or sketching easel, nailing up his sheet, working in swift pencil to define the forms, opening the paint tubes and charging the portable brush he kept in his pocket – the wind all the time tearing at the paper and, ‘in lovely ascending spirals’, blowing away his hat. ‘But what of it,’ as he liked to say.16 He was not deterred by that, or even by the rain; only by his beloved snow, which soaked the paper and rendered it useless.

  Under most conditions he could still try to catch the essence of light, as he had understood it from Rich’s Water Colour Painting: the ‘transparent atmosphere’ or ‘bloom’ or veil that lay over everything in Nature, and which in principle could be evoked by sweeping the colour on in thick washes and allowing it to dry undisturbed. This, Rich wrote, was watercolour’s greatest beauty, and its magic. Ravilious did his best, supplemented by memory and dreaming when he had carried his efforts home. But he felt he produced a ‘pretty low’ percentage of good pictures, maybe one out of three or four, before the principal subject worked free and fled. The failures he would tear into many small, neat, pathetic squares; really ‘I’d like to dig a hole like a cat, and bury [them].’ Rich called such events ‘mortifications’.

  Equally small scraps of paper or squares of card trapped these episodes of light for Palmer, Constable and Turner. It was the swift-brushed work of a minute, done on a lap, in a lid – speed to catch speed – and thrust in a pocket or a box. Palmer called these his ‘blots’, but preserved them carefully; in 1848 he spent much of a holiday in Cornwall teaching himself to draw the scintillation of light on the sea. Between 1817 and 1819 Turner kept a ‘Skies Sketchbook’ of translucent watercolour skies and clouds, light looked through (as Goethe recommended) rather than at; the tiniest streak on paper was so precious to him, and potentially so lucrative, that he would never throw any scrap away. Appropriately enough, he bound each day’s catch round with fishing twine.

  Constable’s cloud-and-sky studies, though much more elaborate, were still timed to the instant.17 He would waylay light just as it reached the top of a cumulus, broke through the stratus or responded to the wind, much as a spy or detective might record the movements of his quarry. (‘11.O clock A.M. very hot with large climbing clouds under the Sun’. ‘5 Oclock afternoon August 1821 very fine bright & wind after rai
n slightly in the morning’. ‘29 July 1822 looking east 10 in the morning – silvery clouds’.) He called this ‘skying’. Later, working from these scraps and from whatever feints or flurries had lodged in his memory, he would try to reproduce the effects on canvas.

  His magic addition was what he called ‘powder’, in flake or China white. He splashed it over his landscapes, according to the Times man, ‘like whitewash’, and with as little care. Turner (Mr ‘Soapsuds and Whitewash’ himself) mocked him for it, told him it looked like drips from painting a ceiling, and urged him to get rid of it, but Constable insisted that this was how summer light played: the sparkle and freshness of scattered drops of white among leaves, off water, under dark trees, in grass. Horses reared up in it, white-shirted reapers lay weary in it; trees thirsted. This light was ‘exhilarating’, ‘blowing’ ‘beautifully silvery’ and ‘delicious’, to use only some of his words. Yet it also adhered to its place, as if caught there. In autumn, Constable promised, it would be ‘washed off’, this summer glitter; for it vanished then.18 All the more ironic, perhaps, that Palmer thought the ‘particular glitter of white’ never vanished from Turner’s paintings, whatever the season.

  For Hopkins the snaring of light with paint was something he both longed, and feared, to do. ‘You know I once wanted to be a painter,’ he wrote to a friend in 1868, already aware at twenty-three that his path was bound elsewhere:

  But even if I could I wd. not, I think, now, for the fact is that the higher and more attractive parts of the art put a strain upon the passions which I shd. think it unsafe to encounter.

  His brother Arthur, four years younger and unburdened with such restraint, had become a successful painter of romantic and rural scenes. In 1888, almost the last year of his life, Gerard wrote to him from Dublin, asking him shyly for a porte-crayon and some drawing chalks, which he could barely afford with his ‘seldom seen pocketmoney’. He enclosed with the letter some of his sketches, ‘to shew you how far my hand is in’, and asked him, too, whether he knew of ‘a way of bringing out high-lights in a drawing better than the watery Chinese-white I have employed on the ox in Phoenix Park’. He was still in pursuit of light, trying to go one better than white chalk, though he thought there was ‘nothing like it’ for catching the instress, the being of a thing. At an exhibition in 1873 he had encountered the technique of scraping off paint for highlights with a knife, a stick or a fingernail while the colour was wet – Turner’s trick. Daisies and blossom, he noted, had been ‘brought out by scratching and even rudely’. He supposed it might last longer than the wretched Chinese white, but shuddered at the thought. Palmer, with his properness, would not use his nails, but instead incised ‘sharp bits of white’ into his sheets for the moon, for reflections, or for wing-flashes of birds. Ravilious sometimes used a razor blade or, when painting snow, a penknife, to scratch the colour off. He loved doing it; this was almost Boy Scout stuff, like tracking, nesting, trailing.

  There were other sleights of hand, or brush. One was to reserve the paper or canvas, leaving it blank among the colours, to depict the sun, the moon or light on things. Dürer did this, realising that the paper itself expressed light, whether emitted or reflected; and that by doing nothing – by ceasing to do, make, strive, fuss, spoil – he too could produce light, like God. Turner and Ravilious both used the technique so freely, sometimes blocking out with wax or paste, more often with little skips between the brushstrokes, that their surfaces sometimes seemed as much untouched as painted on. What a pleasure it would be, Ravilious exclaimed when he saw the chestnut candles in flower, to leave them as bare spots of white paper (‘a trifle larger than life of course’). Like Turner he also kept light alive by washing, using a sponge to lift the paint off and running to the bathroom to sluice the paper vigorously under the tap, so that the springing of his shoes overhead, and the water running, was what one friend most vividly remembered when he stayed. (Paradoxically, he would then worry that ‘I so want the thing not to look washed out as they so often do.’)

  A further trick, often performed by Palmer, was to cut a piece of white paper in the shape and size required and glue it to the board. This was as crude as a stage technician gumming stars on a backdrop (‘Feel free to squander the stars,’ as Goethe told the stage manager of Faust).20 But it worked. Turner sometimes made a large white button of paint do duty for the sun; he did this in his favourite Sun Rising through Vapour where, though cracking, it still clings on. A visitor to his murky home gallery in Queen Anne Street noticed that in the pervading damp one of these sun-buttons had fallen, or been picked, off. Turner did not seem too bothered.

  For Blake, catching light needed none of these stunts. It called only for definite lines, since line was light’s essential nature. As an engraver, he had learned to express light and shade with cross-hatching and with meshes of diamonds and dots, varying only their number and intensity. He had no patience with the ‘Blotted & Blurred’; line must prevail, for then light would. This was why he had invented his gluey white ground, which when dry would take crisply and perfectly every stroke of his pen; this was why he expressed his visions of Dante’s hell and heaven, which Palmer watched him draw, in thinnest pencil, clothing the forms later in watercolour washes through which the lines still showed. He always began with that first lead trace, the most important; almost his last act, with his little remaining money, was to send out for a shilling pencil. ‘I know too well,’ he sighed at the end of his life, ‘that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of the Indefinite.’ To him, though, ‘a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivisions: Strait or Crooked It is Itself.’ That sounded very like a description of a ray of light.

  For many years, Palmer followed Blake. In his drawings and paintings, lines trapped light: ‘When a pure and expressive outline is on the paper,’ he wrote, ‘the prey is caught.’ By the same token, in the words of an old engraver he knew, ‘Lose your line and you lose your light.’ There was ‘might’ and ‘mystery’, to Palmer, in the way a pen line registered on paper: both challenging light and seizing it, in the same stroke.21 In 1824, blinking in Blake’s gaze, he began to insert ‘masses of little forms like the leaves of a near tree’ to serve instead of shadows, making mazes of patterns first in very faint pencil and then in fine, faint ink, leaving the clear areas next to them to shine all the more. He also found that against the hard dark angles of buildings and walls grew ‘the most dotty light things what a contrast!’ Light as dots, or as leaves, would have got past ‘the Interpreter’, as he and his friends called Blake; he dared not suppose, for a time, that anything else would.

  But Palmer was also capable of straying into vaguer territory. As time went on he often expressed a fondness for mottling and dappling, as under trees or in the breaking-up of clouds. In the wooded glens at Hartland in north Devon he noticed that light lay in ‘detached shapes or patches’, ready to grab. At sunrise, especially, it formed ‘massy lumps of brightness’, and figures or sheep front-lit against shadows were ‘like plates or bassi relievi of wrought gold’. That shadowy light-dark, chiaroscuro, had always appalled Blake, at least as it was employed by Titian, Rubens and Sir Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). Blake would print such blobs of colour merely as preparation, in order to corral them into shapes of light with his pen. On the other hand Palmer had long known that chiaroscuro, not always exquisitely defined, also launched that restless life-glance that was the essence of light. He suspected, too – and told others – that Blake had picked up his notion of Titian from ‘picture-dealers’ Titians’, not the real thing. ‘The ANIMATOR is CHIAROSCURO’ he shouted to himself in 1845. In 1849 another note, almost treacherous to Blake, flagged up ‘The principle of the Borghese Titian’:

  viz 1st, globose lights contrasted with sheets of dark, and 2nd, added INTENSE spot of light and dark on figure; as, for instance, black and white cow. Remember this, O thou dull brute!

  He remembered. Ten years later he noted that the month of July brought ‘an immen
se power of Light; searching vast depths of gloom, and woods are very deep’. ‘Mystery, and infinite going-in-i-tiveness’ now enchanted him. No woods were too dark for him, he declared once, because against them the fields, wheat, moon and stars shone with redoubled brilliance. (Ravilious, watching with Palmer’s eyes for enemy aircraft at the start of the war, rejoiced to see at dawn ‘the church lit up vividly at the tower a lovely pink in a black green surround’.22) Palmer’s most successful ‘look of light’, in his own opinion, was achieved in ‘two little moonshines’ in which he had strongly intensified the dark with sepia and Indian ink: not unlike what Galileo had done, in his first chiaroscuros of the moon. The cow was not a perfect aide-memoire, he admitted, for shadows were full of colour, not ‘sullied with blackness’. ‘Do not forget; all is full of colour,’ he nagged himself for the umpteenth time.