徽宗之天青潤澤: Huizong's Celadon Tone Poems singing in Whistler's Visions

雨過天青雲破處，者般颜色做將來。 

Clouds part after the morning rain, colour of the sky,

Such is the colour of the days beyond.

白如玉、薄如纸、明如镜、聲如磐。

Fair as jade, fine as paper, brilliant as mirror, and sounds of grandeur.

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“You could say that when I slowly descended those rarely used steps to the small, always deserted beach, I was making use of a magical process in order to bring myself closer to the possible monad that is my self.”

～Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“...having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”

～Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

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*Two paintings by Whistler: “Nocturne Blue and Silver － Cremorne Lights” (1872) & “Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach”

Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes. (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), On Lake Lucerne, looking towards Fluelen, around 1841. Watercolour, with scraping out and marks made with the thumb, over graphite on wove paper, 223 x 283mm. The Courtauld Gallery, London.

‘The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts.’ ～John Ruskin