Rainbows by Daniel MacCannell

Author:Daniel MacCannell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Bartolomeo Altomonte, The Four Seasons Paying Homage to Chronos, c. 1737, oil on canvas.

The overall whiteness or greyness of the painted bow in the Age of Reason is often apparent, however, even in cases where contrast between the bow and its background is strong. J.M.W. Turner’s magnificent Buttermere Lake, A Shower (1798) has as its centrepiece a milky-white rainbow with the merest hint of peach at its crown. Joseph Wright’s Landscape with Rainbow of 1795 depicts a more clearly bi- or tricolour bow of faint yellow and white or yellowy white above a pale blue-grey; it stands against a sky exactly as dark as Turner’s, but in place of Turner’s foggy apparition – an energy-neutral rip in the fabric of the sky – Wright’s bow glows like a laser beam, and the idea that it is being fired down at the Earth rather than up from it is palpable. Like wise set against a cloudy and threatening sky, the rainbow in Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (c. 1810) appears at first glance to be entirely white, before slowly revealing itself as three bands, of white, pale yellow and pale blue. In Friedrich’s far more dramatic Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (1810), the top two bands have merged into the palest of yellows, but one’s overall sense of the bow is similar. Like effects are attempted in Károly Markó’s Italian Landscape with Viaduct and Rainbow (1838), in which the fairly strong and solid-looking white-rimmed yellow of the primary bow contrasts strongly with the almost ghostly grey insubstantiality of the secondary; and in George Inness’s A Shower on the Delaware River (1891), whose even darker clouds lend a specious whiteness to a rainbow that slowly emerges as – what else? – red, white and blue. Atkinson Grimshaw’s Seal of the Covenant (1868) features a wispy bow that is mostly yellow, emerging from the cloudy background only by virtue of its hue, not its brightness.16 And in Albert Bierstadt’s The Golden Gate (1900), the three-banded bow’s two uppermost bands are both nearly white, albeit tinged with the gold of the title, and its lower band a very pale green.

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