Verging On The Sublime

Klosters' heyday as the winter playground of English royalty is long over but there are no echoes of nostalgia or signs of faded glory about the town's immaculate streets. The whole place is so bright, so spic, span and affluent that it can make an English visitor quite heady. If the altitude doesn't make you swoon, the lack of litter and graffiti will. The sunlight is sharp in the crisp mountain air and everything it touches gleams. The spacious shops are bright with the rainbow colours of hiking gear and pool wear. Mountain bikes, tennis rackets and Norwegian walking poles abound. Winter or summer, Klosters is focussed on the life lived out-of-doors and that is why so many people still take the little red train from Landquart and venturing this far up the Prättigau valley, alight just one stop before Davos. Above the town, the green pastures which swathe the mountain slopes are neater than an English lawn and dotted with old wooden barns that are better kept than any palace. To me, the valley looked so fresh and perky, the entire place could have been a built overnight, just before I arrived.

So here I am, back in Klosters again as a guest of Marianne and Tore Bergengren, rudely awoken by the cart which washes the streets at 7am, peering out of my apartment window at the sun-kissed, verdant slopes that end in those jagged slabs of rock way above my head. And I'm wondering what I'm going to do with them. The trees, the barns, the waterfalls dangling silently from each distant pinnacle like threads of silver, they're all so tiny against the massy rock. Enormous shadows swing about the valley. If you're on the wrong hillside, twilight may reign for hours on end. Unless the sun is directly overhead, it's almost impossible to tell what time of day it is. There's only one kind of majesty in Klosters nowadays; it has ruled the land for centuries and still holds dominion over my mind as I write this, two weeks later.

Just how do you fit a mountain on a sheet of watercolour paper?

The Swiss philosopher, Jean-JacquesRousseau identified the healthy individual as one who was free from the corruption of modern civilised society and (not for the first time) equated the natural world with the idea of innocence. Similarly, the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proclaimed a 'visionary fondness for fields and woods and mountains,' which he believed, kept the 'bad passions' in inaction. In the eighteenth century, thinkers, writers and poets alike, began to look to Nature to define and determine our moral, as well as our mental and emotional states. The time was right therefore, for an art that reflected these preoccupations. That art, was the art of the landscape and the medium that was best-suited to the purpose, was watercolour.

John Robert Cozens: Between Martigny and Chamonix

English watercolourists, in fact, had been articulating these preoccupations for many years previously, but it must be born in mind that their medium was seen as a rather lowly one and worse, the stinging words of Michelangelo must have rung still in the ears of many an art-lover, when he called landscape art 'a vague and deceitful sketch; a game for children and old men.'

JMW Turner South gate of Sargans (after JRC)

Nothing, however, could capture those vast expanses and wide skies quite as effectively as humble water soluble pigment on paper.

Francis Towne: La Chaperieux

By why the pre-occupation with lofty crags and deep ravines?

John Warwick Smith: Alpine Bridge

The English essayist and politician, Joseph Addison, after undertaking the Grand tour through France, Switzerland and Italy in 1699, declared that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror." 
This is the frisson that Andrew Wilton refers to in his introduction to 'The Great Age Of British Watercolours,' which we may experience when we are confronted by high waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, oceans or storms and our instinct for self-preservation is threatened. This awareness that we are pitted and measured against almighty forces that overshadow and overwhelm us, acquired a moral dimension through the work of philosophers like Kant and Burke and developed into the concept of the Sublime in nature; a concept that was commensurate with, but separate from, that of beauty. In 'A Philosophical Enquiry,' Burke's investigation into the origin of our ideas of beauty and the sublime, the philosopher even went so far as to suggest a quasi-physiological cause for the frisson that is evoked by vast and lofty visual phenomena. The retina, Burke claimed, is so excited by scanning so many successive data points of information that the eye vibrates almost to the point of pain, and consequently 'must produce an idea of the sublime.'

Salvador Dali: Soft Construction With Boiled Beans

The Sublime was finally overwhelmed by the industrialising forces that spawned it and the Great War decimated the ruling class that both sponsored and patronised it. The work of Freud and Jung, meanwhile, suggested a different trajectory for artistic endeavour and the Grand Tour was replaced with an equally hazardous inward journey. After the welter of radical and sensational 'ism's that characterised twentieth century art, John Robert Cousins and the other watercolourists of Britain's Great Age, could  easily be mistaken for mere nostalgists, rather than the plumbers of the human spirit that they were.

The Sublime, courtesy of EasyJet

No one has to risk traversing the Mont Cenis Pass in a wicker basket these days and the alternative coastal journey to Italy is relatively free of Moorish pirates. And thanks to the democratising effect of the camera, the Sublime is within easy reach of anyone with a mobile 'phone and a reservation on a budget flight. A contemporary version of the Sublime would also have to include the routinely breathtaking images captured by the crew of the International Space Station. 

Earth from the ISS

Astronomy raises the bar by light years.

Omega Nebula by NASA, ESA and J. Hester (ASU)

Back on Earth in Klosters, I know that I will never climb the peaks that dominate my every waking moment.

Chandler: Silvretta Alps

Chandler: From Gotschnagrat

Chandler: Muggenwald

I have to find my own way of conquering them.