PETER QUINCE
Modern man's infatuation about sunshine is perfectly understandable, given that modern man has to live the bulk of his life at two removes from the natural world — firstly indoors, and, secondly, indoors in a large city. He heads for the sunlit south during his annual period of release like a frustrated toper hurrying into a pub at opening time, hopeful of making up for what he has been missing and of stocking up against the next long spell of deprivation. We who live a less urbanised existence do not share this craving. Contrary to popular complaint, the English climate in fact affords a great deal of sunshine through the year. At times it can even be excessive. We have had a long spell of sunshine this summer and there was general agreement in my village that it was time for a change. Conditioned as we are by constantly changing weather, we grow restive when one hot day is followed by another, and then another, for weeks upon end. Gardens languish, parched, unless the gardener exerts himself frequently with wateringcan or hose. The countryside assumes a dusty jaded look. Ungrateful it may be; but as we sweat in the hot and humid atmosphere, our minds turn increasingly to the pleasures of soft refreshing rain. It came at last the other evenings, after the long drought had culminated in a couple of days of thunderous tension in the air. For a time the heavy green foliage of the trees was motionless. There was a sense of impending drama. Then came the catharsis: a sudden movement of every leaf as a wind emerged without warning from the darkening sky, and a clatter of thunder like some colossal fall of masonry in the clouds, and at last we heard the steady soothing sound of falling rain. Next morning the world seemed to have been reborn, with a new vividness of colour everywhere, a new fragrance, a new rejuvenating freshness in the air. What pleases the eye under a clear Italian sky is one thing; what gives equal pleasure in these more northerly lattitudes is altogether another. As I walked up the damp path over the hill and watched the moving clouds making their intricate variations of shading in the air and on the land, I remembered what Constable had once said. The best lesson on art he ever received, he declared, was contained in the words: "Remember, light and shadow never stand still." Naturally enough this is a lesson which northern painters and especially English painters have learned more profitably than any others. One has only to step outside in England on a warm blowy morning after a summer rainstorm, to see why. The Dutch who live on no less intimate terms with water, have *Also been enriched by jt. All those moody canvases of Holland's flat, watery landscape beneath skies of fleeting ever-changing drama strike an instant response in the English observer, with his eye always appreciative of atmospheric effects. Indeed, a great Dutch painter like Jacob van Ruisdael had learned Constable's lesson long before him: he too was absorbed by the moving pageantry of clouds and loved to seize upon a moment when a break in the billowing masses of vapour allowed a shaft of sunlight to illuminate, momentarily, a patch of water or a green field. Our own East Anglian school of painters who learned to find their subjects in their lowlying landscape and huge, constantly changing skies, owed him an immense debt. But then, all of them were the beneficiaries of our inconstant northern weather, which so seldom bores us with fatiguing monotony, and fills the sky with infinite variety.
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