391
of “Gardening,” “Humility,” and “Gratitude.”
5
And it brings into proper focus the
history of the United Kingdom since the last Ice Age, as interpreted by one mystic
whose life is caught out in the very web of that ecological series of
transformations.
Juliana’s life comports in numerous respects with her Norwich successor, Sir
Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician, philosopher, naturalist, and mystic, whose
great confessional, Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician, 1643), speaks to
the life of Pythagoras, to metempsychosis, to the nature of man versus the worms
that devour him. And, ultimately, to that strange “Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and
distinguished worlds, for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason;
the one visible, the other invisible.”
6
Both Juliana and Thomas Browne set the appropriate groundwork for a painter
who lived all of 52 years (life expectancy in 1820s England was 40 years for a man,
although compared with Keats, who died just a few months before Crome, aged 25,
death could be famous for her randomness) and managed resolutely to wander at his
more-or-less leisure, depicting the scenes he so loved, in a city that had the principal
advantages of London, without its Big Smoke or Great Wen. Wrote Norman
L. Goldberg in his two-volume comprehensive biography and “critical catalogue”
of Crome, “His capacity for keeping inviolable the emotional response to the
observable beauty of nature was the essence of his aesthetic development. Few
indeed are the landscape artists who, in their search for order, truth, and beauty, have
risen to such dignity of manner.”
7
43.2 A Cosmic Norwich
The Norwich School and Society of Artists was most prominent during the first
three decades of the nineteenth century, under the enthusiastic sway of Crome. It
had much to do with a legacy of East Anglia’s pastoral calm that today’s world has
fortunately inherited. But Crome’s modest obsessions also raise important questions, earlier posed, that involve the motives, circumstances, and built-up historical
genotypes, as it were, that inspire certain individuals to test the boundaries of their
physical and perceptual worlds. Crome—a master of the “picturesque”—provides a
gentle but persuasive link between the worlds of the Dutch master Meindert
5 See https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/94606632/2018_Foster_Gilbert_Claire_1352686_ethesis.pdf,
cal-crisis-a-postricoeurian-reading-of-the-julian-of-norwich-texts(7637e8b5-44fa-4725-b6a67075cb99caac).html.
6 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Sixth Edition, With Annotations; and Observations by Sir
Kenelm Digby, Printed for Andrew Crook, London 1659 pp. 74–75.
7 See John Crome the Elder, Norman L. Goldberg, Two Volumes, New York University Press,
New York, 1978, Volume I, p. 34.
43.2 A Cosmic Norwich
of “Gardening,” “Humility,” and “Gratitude.”
5
And it brings into proper focus the
history of the United Kingdom since the last Ice Age, as interpreted by one mystic
whose life is caught out in the very web of that ecological series of
transformations.
Juliana’s life comports in numerous respects with her Norwich successor, Sir
Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician, philosopher, naturalist, and mystic, whose
great confessional, Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician, 1643), speaks to
the life of Pythagoras, to metempsychosis, to the nature of man versus the worms
that devour him. And, ultimately, to that strange “Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and
distinguished worlds, for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason;
the one visible, the other invisible.”
6
Both Juliana and Thomas Browne set the appropriate groundwork for a painter
who lived all of 52 years (life expectancy in 1820s England was 40 years for a man,
although compared with Keats, who died just a few months before Crome, aged 25,
death could be famous for her randomness) and managed resolutely to wander at his
more-or-less leisure, depicting the scenes he so loved, in a city that had the principal
advantages of London, without its Big Smoke or Great Wen. Wrote Norman
L. Goldberg in his two-volume comprehensive biography and “critical catalogue”
of Crome, “His capacity for keeping inviolable the emotional response to the
observable beauty of nature was the essence of his aesthetic development. Few
indeed are the landscape artists who, in their search for order, truth, and beauty, have
risen to such dignity of manner.”
7
43.2 A Cosmic Norwich
The Norwich School and Society of Artists was most prominent during the first
three decades of the nineteenth century, under the enthusiastic sway of Crome. It
had much to do with a legacy of East Anglia’s pastoral calm that today’s world has
fortunately inherited. But Crome’s modest obsessions also raise important questions, earlier posed, that involve the motives, circumstances, and built-up historical
genotypes, as it were, that inspire certain individuals to test the boundaries of their
physical and perceptual worlds. Crome—a master of the “picturesque”—provides a
gentle but persuasive link between the worlds of the Dutch master Meindert
5 See https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/94606632/2018_Foster_Gilbert_Claire_1352686_ethesis.pdf,
cal-crisis-a-postricoeurian-reading-of-the-julian-of-norwich-texts(7637e8b5-44fa-4725-b6a67075cb99caac).html.
6 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Sixth Edition, With Annotations; and Observations by Sir
Kenelm Digby, Printed for Andrew Crook, London 1659 pp. 74–75.
7 See John Crome the Elder, Norman L. Goldberg, Two Volumes, New York University Press,
New York, 1978, Volume I, p. 34.
43.2 A Cosmic Norwich