The Canterbury Tales
Mid-morning on a January day in Canterbury, England. The air is dense, cold and damp and engorged with moisture, the atmosphere hushed and eerie. A fine day for a little photography.
It is days like this, when heavy fog envelopes spires and rooflines and a fine mist creeps along the ground, that I revel in being out of doors with my camera in hand. In this viscous landscape, things shape-shift, disappear and reappear, and take on strange new guises. A mundane storefront is transformed by numinous mist into a little shop of curiosities. A welcoming cottage assumes a sinister and foreboding countenance. And the headstones in a local cemetery are right at home in the creeping fog.
On the edges of town, thick haze drapes ancient and gnarled trees and rises in curtains from the river. The hush of the fog blankets the world. Sounds are amplified, distorted, and colors are muted. The browns of bark and stone and the greens of leaf and blade fade into muddy, subdued tones. There is an otherworldly and tranquil quality to this eerie landscape of neutrals.
A Study in Contrast
Such conditions afford another benefit – the peace and solitude of a city that is shut up indoors. I thus found a small park virtually to myself, save for a trio of adolescents braving the wet and the chill. They amused themselves by breaking up and pushing around chunks of ice in a partially frozen fountain. Here, the icicle-encrusted fountain and Victorian bandstand in the near- but mist-obscured distance are made all the more whimsical by the presence of children at play.
Other figures arrive out of the fog. Here a dark form emerges from a path lined with poplar trees. Elsewhere, two black-clad figures stroll through town, their path at this moment in time placing them in front of the English Gothic Canterbury Cathedral. The pair’s black coats stand in sharp contrast to the grainy haze that cloaks the Cathedral.
Up close, sandy-hued limestone walls are brought into focus in the foreground, while high spires and towers are blunted and concealed. In the cloisters, a weak light from the courtyard filters softly through stained glass.
The Art of the Fog
These ghostly scenes call to mind works of German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. Barren trees, church ruins, and gravestones shrouded in early morning fog are common elements in his paintings, meant to evoke a spiritual connection to the natural world. Friedrich’s treatment of the landscape, particularly his use of light and atmospheric effects, was quite novel at the time. Rather than depicting a scene in full and in focus, Friedrich instead highlighted that which was hidden – a landscape in partial view under limited visibility.
The painting for which this post is named, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, is a fine example of this and of Romanticism broadly. It deals with classic themes of the genre – the sublimity of nature that is at once awe-inspiring and dangerously unpredictable, as well as the individual’s relationship to and place in the natural world. In the painting, a lone figure on a rocky outcrop surveys the blustery landscape before him, much of it hidden from view by great clouds and fog. The viewer is invited to experience the scene from the figure’s perspective, a technique known as rückenfigur that was popularized by Friedrich. The roiling scene is both breathtaking in its stark beauty and terrible in its raw force, while the obscuring effect of the fog suggests the unknowable quality of nature. In a word, it is sublime.
One thought on “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”