In the landscape

You look for one book and you find another. While looking for "my Itten" I happened to open "Landscape Painting" by Bo Jeffares, published in 1979 (and smelling a bit musty from long disuse). It's got a high ratio of pictures to text, and the words are well chosen.

This landscape is by an unknown Florentine painter about 1500. The description starts: "Bad painters take heart. Here is a painting chock-a-block with faults that have survived for 400 years." Yes the buildings are set at contradictory angles and the hillside is about to topple over, but it's utterly charming, carefully and sincerely done. I love the way everyone is just getting on with whatever they need to be doing. "This unknown artist who provided such a wealth of picaresque detail arranged his trees, buildings, rocks and figures with enormous variety, shaking up his basic materials to make an integrated whole. There is no surprise in discovering a monk up a tree or under a crevice, for this busy self-absorbed community inhabits its rock landscape with the deliberation of ants on an anthill."

Bo Jeffares has also written "The artist in 19th century fiction" - anyone out there have a copy?