May trees, and the double may, flowered in great profusion, lit by bright sunlight. Chestnut trees carried ever broader towers of white bloom. The white of chequer trees began. Cow parsley, Queen Anne’s lace, grew tall and flowered white with great exuberance in fields and ditches. And, above white plants, the gigantic rounded heads and full sails of sun-bright cumulus swelled up as white as laundry.

Christopher Neve's classic book is a journey into the imagination through the English landscape. How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? 'Painting', says Neve, 'is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis.' What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (13 August 1889 – 7 October 1946) was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson, and was also known as Richard. Considering Michelangelo and his “Last Five Drawings”, Neve insists that these are “drawings of ideas. He has made ideas’ chief province the incomparable human form.” We are shown The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John in a colour plate; it is the quintessence of late style – liminal, hesitant, worked at, yet wholly persuasive. Neve writes: “Do not say: this is drawing by an old man’s shaky hand. For it is drawing by one of the greatest sensibilities there has ever been, at its wits’ end.”Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to Michelangelos final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality. Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to Michelangelo's final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists' late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality.

Unquiet Landscape is a fascinating, considered and evocative work and should be read slowly for full appreciation. It is refreshing that the author does not try to lump artists into groups and movements. What I cannot tell, however, is the difference between what artists had told him and his speculation about their inspiration, motives and ideas.

1889–1946

He turns his gaze frequently to the sky, with an eye for cloud formations as acute and ample as Poussin’s. The cover — Paul Nash’s painting Landscape: The Vernal Equinox, 1944 — might lead one at first glance to believe the book is about painters who specialised in the English countryside and nature, such as Eric Ravilious, John Nash, Ivon Hitchens and John Piper. All except for some reason Piper, an extremely popular artist at the time, are indeed included but Neve extends the interpretation of landscape, and the book is far more interesting for it. Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with short accounts of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that are closely intertwined. From Cezanne's last watercolours to Michelangelo's final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists' late ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context of Time and mortality. It's perhaps because of this trend that I disliked Neve's one flaw in Immortal Thoughts, the one wilful sullying of his own commendable purity. The essays in the book are linked by a series of vignettes in which Neve gives his impressions on the then-developing Covid pandemic (the 'Time of Plague' of the book's subtitle). The writing in these parts is lesser than in the main essays (including some overly florid nature-writing delivered in fragmented sentences), but that is not where the problem lies. The problem is that Neve's impressions of the Covid era are of the most credulous and hyper-partisan tone, with bodies piling higher than an apocalyptic movie, newborn children starving to death in untended cribs and, behind it all, that beastly "despotic" president inciting a "seditious mob" to storm the Capitol (pp105, 132). The book – ironically printed in China – is careless with its words in such passages and completely uncritical in accepting the sensationalized media narrative. It's a glaring and unsettling contrast to Neve's thoughtful and nuanced criticism of art in his main essays. Such foolishness provokes an eye-roll rather than offence, but considering the book's Covid "plague" framing can be said to be a play for posterity, there is perhaps an obligation to be more responsible. In the chapter on Titian, still at work in his late eighties, we are confronted again with the possibility that “behind the ordinary is some terrifying truth”, the eternal verity we know is there, the elusiveness of which torments us, and which we can only approach, if we can approach it at all, crabwise. So it is for even the greatest: “Titian works out of chance and intuition towards a kind of exuberance, much as conversations consist of things we do not say.”