Dimensions: support: 445 x 419 mm frame: 690 x 603 x 71 mm
Copyright: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: This is John Brett's "Glacier of Rosenlaui," currently at the Tate. I’m struck by the contrast between the detailed foreground and the hazy glacier receding into the distance. What statement might Brett be making here? Curator: Consider the 19th century and its scientific explorations. Doesn't this evoke a moment of profound environmental awareness, even anxiety? The glacier, rendered with such cold precision, becomes a symbol of nature's power but also its fragility, especially when we consider landscape art's role in colonial expansion and resource extraction. Editor: So you're saying the sublime beauty could be a commentary on our relationship with nature? Curator: Precisely. It asks us to reflect on our impact, doesn’t it? The painting is not just a landscape, but a social document. Editor: It makes you think differently about these landscapes. Thank you! Curator: My pleasure. Art helps us interrogate the present through the past.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/brett-glacier-of-rosenlaui-n05643
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The Rosenlaui glacier is at the foot of two spectacular Alpine peaks, including the Dossenhorn, and yet they are not the focus here. Instead Brett makes a meticulous study of different types of rocks and pebbles, offset by the dense blue white folds of the glacier itself. This attention to the detail as well as enormity of nature reflects the critic John Ruskin’s sentiment that a small stone was ‘a mountain in miniature’. Brett had travelled to Switzerland after reading Ruskin’s Of Mountain Beauty and met the artist John William Inchbold who influenced him to ‘paint all I could see’. From William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book 6, Cambridge and the Alps, 1850 ... The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls,And in the narrow rent at every turnWinds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-sideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,The unfettered clouds and regions of the Heavens,Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light –Were all like workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree;Characters of the great Apocalypse,The types and symbols of Eternity,Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. Gallery label, March 2010
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