Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

Van Gogh made this point to his brother Theo.23 One of the most beautiful things painters had done, he told him, was ‘the painting of black, which nevertheless has light in it’. He had tried it himself in a sloping beech wood near The Hague, intrigued by the ‘enormous force and solidness’ of the deep reddish-brown ground covered with mouldering leaves, the streaks and blottings of tree-shadow, and the ‘dark masses of mysterious shadow’ that resolved themselves into wood gatherers, ‘a bonnet, a cap, a shoulder’, against the sky. ‘I perceived for the first time while painting it,’ he wrote, ‘how much light there was in that dusk.’

  I first saw this effect one June evening in Staplefield, about a dozen miles from Brighton. It was nine o’clock, the very end of the day; the Victory Inn had finished serving, and the cook had gone home. Deprived of dinner, I tried instead to record what light, and the dark, were doing.

  We came here down a lane of tall beeches and mauve rhododendrons, the trees flushed in maximum leaf, the bushes fully out. Both the green and the purple still glow out of deep and deepening shade, as if all the light that remains has shrunk back into them. This is a slow light, thickened, heavy, rich, like a decoction of liquor half condensed away to make purple, to make green, and to paint the shadow-drowned crimson of a young copper beech, its leaves still silver-crinkled with unfolding.

  These colours are Light holding out to the last – painting the night even as it retreats into it, as when a candle burning down sinks into its own glow, and its own dark.

  Chiaroscuro was still the key to everything. Both Turner and Palmer, as it happened, kept their best paintings in the dark – Turner taping up his sooty windows with brown paper, while Palmer stacked his glowing Shoreham ‘relics’ dustily on top of a cupboard – so that, in the gloom, they shone.24 As Goethe wrote, ‘The greatest brightness acts near the greatest darkness’: acted, struggled, suffered, lived. He was almost cripplingly aware of that himself. When he was young, he had tried etching; but since he was unable to ‘bring in that essential point’, light challenging shade, he quickly gave up trying.

  For Turner, chiaroscuro was fundamental to what he called ‘the English effect’: ‘masses of light and shadow, or local light and dark’. In his Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), he interlaced white and black brushstrokes, or no brushstrokes, until light was meshed and wrestling everywhere on his canvas. This was the storm, ‘on the night the Ariel left Harwich’, in which he claimed to have been tied to the mast for four hours, simply to observe luminescence bursting out of the raging sea. (In September 1935 Ravilious, with Turner’s ‘extravagant and formless pictures’ in mind, walked out to the end of the jetty at Newhaven in a wild storm of breaking spray, commenting later to Helen that ‘I got very wet and I think now it was almost a dangerous walk out there, but worth it.’) Turner may have made the mast story up, however; the Ariel was not a ship known at Harwich, though Ariel belonged to the trickster-history of light, and this Turner captured in a great swirl of black and white right in the middle of his canvas, a perfect vortex of snow. ‘You can never reach the brilliancy of Nature,’ he wrote to little Mary Potter, aged ten, when he was old; but ‘you need never be afraid of putting your brightest light next to your deepest shadow, in the centre’. As he had done.

  The colour of light itself remained a tendentious question. Palmer kept in a drawer in his etching cupboard a tiny box labelled ‘BRIGHTS’ in which, his son Alfred reported,25

  there dwelt, protected from all contamination, and each in a white paper jacket neatly fitted over the upper part of it, certain cakes of the colours with which my father worked on the brightest passages in his drawings.

  There was little doubt about the chief of these. ‘Use the zinc-white (in tube) freely,’ Palmer wrote to himself; ‘… only mind (and this is very important) when you use heightening lights, on a tree already painted for instance, do the lights first, delicately and sharply with white; when dry, add the colour.’ He had not forgotten Blake’s delight in certain ‘untouched and unscrubbed’ paintings by Claude in which, ‘when minutely examined, there were, on the focal lights of the foliage, small specks of pure white which made them appear to be glittering with dew which the morning sun had not yet dried up’. (The Interpreter discoursed on these all through an evening walk, so warmly that, though the sun had set, his Claudes ‘made sunshine in that shady place’.) His search for ‘pure white’ led Palmer to return to barium sulphate or calcium carbonate for his thicker impastos, such as those required to paint his Shoreham apple tree exploding with blossom in 1829. He still loved zinc oxide; but it showed very faintly blue in daylight, and therefore wouldn’t do.

  After white, yellow needed working on to yield up its maximum quota of light. ‘Make washed gamboge and raw Sienna the key of yellow,’ Palmer jotted later, and tried cadmium yellow, which arrived in the 1840s, to see what it could do. (Monet, asked what colours he used for light, also answered: ‘Flake white and cadmium yellow.’) Any colour, not least yellow, could be mixed with gum arabic, gouache or egg white to make it shine. The tint Palmer most often aimed for was amber, because this was translucent rather than reflective: light might be trapped in it as surely as fine ferns and long-legged flies were caught within the fossil-stone. And yet in the end real light (as he called it) was ‘wholly beyond the reach of mere colours’.26 Even the ‘ever fluctuating colour’ in Blake’s painted books – those ‘Spires … of fire vibrating with the full prism’ that seemed to make the very pages, like a butterfly, quiver to life in his hand – were separate, Palmer thought, from the ‘living light’ in them. What he really needed to add to his pigments, he mused one day, were drops from ‘little bottles of sunbeams’. Only then would it be possible to paint a scarlet cherry-leaf with the sunlight on it; or anything else in sunlight, for that matter.

  Turner stuck, notoriously, to pale Naples yellow, patiently ground for him each day in Queen Anne Street by his slatternly, bandage-swaddled serving woman, Mrs Danby. His critics accused him of swabbing it on his canvases with a mop out of a bucket. It brightened things up, he snapped back; and in any case this was the spectrum-colour that got closest to light, though he soon believed, with Palmer, that light’s ‘secret’ essence could not be caught that way. A little red book with a clasp, dated 1813 when he was thirty-eight, contained nine pages about yellows, including orange oxide, Naples yellow and paper-maker’s yellow, together with a scrap of paper detailing a process by which potash added to a solution of iron made a ‘beautiful yellow oxide’. Another, a chloride of lead oxide, was actually called ‘Turner’s yellow’ in the trade. The ‘economy frames’ he made himself were ropes slathered with tempera yellow ochre. He would carry on, then, with his yellow-sailed boats and swimming yellow skies, even if the Italians accused him of painting with mustard and his fellow diners of dabbling with mayonnaise. He would gruffly beat them off, even when Constable (getting his own back) accused him of ‘stagnant sulphur’, and critics complained of ‘a devil of a lot of chrome’. The foregrounds of some of his sketches for seascapes were scratched yellow, as though he defiantly applied it with his nails.

  If Ravilious wanted a focus of light he too used yellow, though he also favoured it, as Turner did, simply because he liked it.28 Though fond enough of white – white posts, yachts, mills, whalebones and peacocks were all eagerly commended – he was instinctively drawn to a yellow tie (out of the many options provided by Helen), a yellow phaeton, a yellow knife-grinder’s cart and ‘ochre’ railway carriages, as much as to a pretty girl in a yellow dress. (He took pride in saying, though, that he never dabbled in either egg yolk or gold leaf to get a shine.) His painting of the baker’s cart at Hedingham in 1936 dissatisfied him because ‘[it] is a bit too pale, and whenever I see the cart opposite in full daffodil yellow, I wish I’d laid on the colour more.’ A group of fresh-cut tree trunks, which would have made Hopkins mourn, pleased him for their ‘Naples yellow … with a rind of sienna.’ He delighted in a ‘capital’ rowing boat that was washed
up at Dover in the war: ‘bright red and banana yellow – I wonder if somebody landed in it? It was so irresistible I made a tolerably good drawing of it, with some shelling going on at sea …’

  Yellow, for Coleridge, was summed up by a birch or an ash in autumn: ‘Fire & Gold’ solitary on some rock, or dappled in the River Greta like ‘a painter’s sun shine’. How he wished he might be that painter. (As it was, he could barely draw a line; his clumsy notebook doodles were captioned ‘Miserable scribble!’ or ‘I cannot even mock it’.) The Head of Glen Nevish, he sighed on his Scottish tour in 1803, ‘how simple for a Painter/ & in how many words & how laboriously, in what dim similitudes & slow & dragging Circumlocutions must I give it –’. And a few days later, trying to describe a ‘sweet delicate birch’ near Loch Ness, ‘O Christ, it maddens me that I am not a painter or that Painters are not I!’ If he could not paint light, perhaps he could nonetheless make studies (his emphasis) with his pencil and memorandum book, his quills and portable inkwell, ‘moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses’. Or, lacking the book, perhaps he could impress the scene permanently on his mind, blink it in, as when in December that year he confronted the marvel of Helm Crag, Easedale and the Langdale Pikes under snow: ‘O remember it – The eye – let it be a spectrum in my feverous brain!’

  Few men have hungered for light as Coleridge did. He was not merely born but ‘sprang to light’, ardent to be part of it. Bullied at school, as fat boys fond of cake tend to be, he would seek solace in some sunny corner, rather than the shade.29 That, as well as his tendency to berate himself in his notebooks, may account for why Palmer felt such sympathy with him, loved to read about him, and made a pilgrimage to his house in Highgate, long after his death, to look at his things and sit on his seat in the garden. It may also have been why Hopkins, whose boyhood diaries were already full of the gleam, flash and patterning of light, considered him a forerunner and, in a way, a friend.

  In his Lakeland years, especially, Coleridge tracked every last effect of light: the ‘rainwet silver’ of slate roofs, sunspots moving ‘slowly and sadly’ up a mountainside, flecks of summer beams on moss, the ‘silver-gilt’ polish of sun-gleams on thinning ice, the ‘shower of diamond Spearlets’ dropping from a wind-driven cloud of snow.30 The very purpose of his notebooks, he wrote, was to try to make ‘the Light … permanent for myself’. Awake at night (how often awake!), stumbling to the window to empty his chamber pot, he observed the silver struggles of moon and clouds, or tried to count the stars. Moved to love again (how often moved!), he described that jolt of the heart as ‘a flash of lightning, or the strike of a Horse’s Shoe, on a Flint, in utter darkness’. Before a scene or a painting he searched always for the Licht-punkt, the ‘single sensation’, the Sparkle in it, as if he could pluck it out like a pebble from a pool. In fact, when he considered it, each moment of time was a Licht-punkt, ‘the Sparkle in the indivisible undivided Duration’.

  At his desk he tried to pin down the effect of his candle on paper or the nature of the flame, whether conical, tapering, squared-off or ‘somewhat rounded’. This was never idle musing, and never purely scientific; it fell into metaphysics very fast. On December 30th 1803 at half past one in the morning (‘or rather therefore, Dec. 31st’) he constructed for himself a species of candle out of rolled bits of paper, little bits of wick, some tallow and the soap, which when lit gave a huge but ineffectual flame through which his book blurred, ‘just as thro’ Tears, or in dizziness’. (‘Every line of every Letter dislocated into angles/or like the mica in crumbly Stones.’) This, he claimed rather outlandishly, was an experiment to illustrate his idea of motion – ‘namely, that it is presence & absence rapidly alternating, so as that the fits of absence exist continuously in the Feeling, & the Fits of Presence vice versa continuedly in the Eye/’ – the to-and-fro velocity of light, indeed. A few days earlier he had pondered the image, diamond-shaped, of his candle in his pot of urine, casting light and shade through the brown-yellow transpicuous liquid in which the contents of the snuffers floated, and thought how beautiful it was.

  Light trapped, even in these ingenious ways, was not calmed. Whether in branches, clouds, water or a chamber pot, it flickered and danced in continual unrest. Some painters, though, seemed almost to hold it still. The more meditative paintings of Jan Vermeer or Georges de la Tour were lit not by a hectic dazzle of light but by a concentrated glow of it, diffused through small mullions or high dim apertures or by the blue wisp at a candle’s heart, which burned more steadily than the flame. Vermeer in one famous scene filtered this light through greyish glass and the slow flow of milk from earthenware, evoking St Bridget in her dairywoman’s cell. This seemed to be how light might be caught, as if in a deep well of quiet. In the paintings of Claude – which made the young Turner weep in the gallery as he viewed them, for he was sure he could never emulate them – whole mythical scenes were filled with such a light, seas suffused with it and temples honeyed with it. This was surely the closest earthly light could get to Paradise.

  Even these scenes, of course, were not as still as they appeared. Palmer pointed out that light was ‘the accident which most quickens such beauty’, and that Claude’s ‘pearl’ and ‘golden’ influences were in motion as well as repose.31 Claude’s friend Joachim confirmed that he snatched and grabbed at light like anyone else; that ‘when he discovered anything in the fields, he immediately prepared his colours accordingly and ran home’. Nonetheless, the effect was of serene and silent gold.

  This rare Claudian light might suddenly gleam on particular small fields, filling them to overflowing before it passed. Hopkins gazed on one from the balcony of the Jesuit house at Beaumont, ‘a square of pale gold-leaf’ apparently caught up in the elm in front of it – treasure, certainly. On such a patch of ground, bathed by ladder-rays glittering with back-and-forth angels, Jacob dreamed that he was in ‘the house of God,’ and ‘the gate of heaven’. The message in that case was clear. More often, though, it was cryptic, or not understood in time, as R.S. Thomas ruefully reported:

  I have seen the sun break through

  to illuminate a small field

  for a while, and gone my way

  and forgotten it. But that was the

  pearl of great price, the one field that had

  treasure in it.

  Coleridge was tormented by such a thought.32 He seldom failed to notice ‘Jacob’s ladders’, with the hawks falling through them like stars and the ‘sunpatched fields’ they led to or from; he once even bloodily nicked himself in his excitement when, as he was shaving, he saw one in the glass. But they reminded him only of failure, of impossibility, of golden opportunities slipping through his hands. ‘This is Oct 19. 1803,’ he scribbled after sighting one:

  Wed. Morn. tomorrow my Birth Day, 31 years of age! – O me! my very heart dies! – This year has been one painful Dream/ I have done nothing! – O for God’s sake, let me whip & spur …

  Among painters Constable loved these singular, glowing fields, but he was not the first. In 1494 Albrecht Dürer, on his way from Nuremberg to Italy, dismounted from his horse, opened his small pack of dry-powder colours, and ambushed light in a tiny painting now called Trees in an Alpine Landscape. The scene before him was a simple composition of three principal colours, light green, dark green and blue-grey; it was the light green, sunlit field that sang. He laid the colours down in pure, transparent washes, touched the bright field with ochre and yellow, and did not work them up into anything more. There was no need; God had made it, he remade it. Das ist gemacht, as he liked to say. His monogram showed that he considered it done.

  The light in this painting, now in Vienna, is more than 500 years old. In oils it would be aged and imprisoned by layers of varnish, as Blake would have groaned; but here, in this little watercolour, the sunshine is of now. You might walk in this field, part the tall, flowering grass, feel a brown butterfly brush your hand, and only then, looking up, see a man in a fifteenth-cen
tury hat wiping away sweat, and a girl in a white shift (crowned with the poppies and ox-eye daisies you had thought to pick) walking with her psalter, suddenly aware of you.

  A single field illuminated in a distant landscape has much the same effect on time. This light is so confined, so specific, that it can seem ancient, left over from when the first terraces were dug or even when the hills were formed. Light so intense bleaches out modern crops and machinery and rubs away footprints, if they were ever there. Henry Vaughan thought such fields – ‘Jacob’s Beds,’ as he called them – were virgin soil, to be trodden only by ‘prophets and Friends of God’.33 They become untouched places where every possibility awaits. Memory lays a similar bright screen across once-familiar streets, lawns and sands, Coleridge’s ‘sweet sunshiny meadows of Childhood’, whose innocence is never shadowed and where light no longer moves.

  My own earliest memory is of light through window-glass, spattered with rain and the bluish trails of rain, and shadowed on the left-hand side by blue-and-red seaside windmills whirring on wooden sticks. I’ve been told that this must be Bognor, just beside Blake’s vision-filled Felpham, and must be a certain boarding house where we were kept in by bad weather among the chintz occasional chairs.

  Behind the pane white heaped-up light, perhaps reflected off the clouds and sea, pressed close to us, like something that must come in yet was kept out, and my own small hand went up to greet and touch it. It did not try to get away.

  Perhaps, then, light could find tranquillity only within or behind glass: ‘light without winde’, in Herbert’s words.34

  A man that looks on glasse,

  On it may stay his eye;

  Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,

  And then the heav’n espie.

  To ‘stay the eye on glass’ was easy enough in Herbert’s day. Glass was thick, mullioned and pocked with flaws, as Newton grumbled. Light could barely get through. In those half-lit days Traherne, ‘about 4 yeer old’, and sitting on a stool by the fire in ‘a little obscure room in my Fathers poor House’, fell to wondering why God did not give him some of the infinite riches He possessed, including infinite light; why all he had were dim, barely illuminated things, and in the silent hall ‘saw nothing mine/ But som few Cups and Dishes shine’: