In Room 15 of the Fitzwilliam, through the sliding doors of the Saxon coin room, a set of landscapes are mounted. Some, over three metres high, demand a craning of the neck, a reassessment of the feet, a holding of the spine.

Albert van Everdingen’s ‘A Norwegian landscape’ is self-explanatory in title. Everdingen’s oil on canvas considers the rock face, vegetation, and sky (a hut sits quietly within), in a palette of greens, greys, and browns. Ten steps away, a disciple of Everdingen, Jacob von Ruisdael’s ‘Landscape with a waterfall’ similarly attends to the rugged, elemental structures of North-European environments. In the space between: sky, rock, water, goat, tree, light, dark, home.

Ruisdael’s oils have turned plastic in the vertical gallery light. Seeing becomes foggy, tired, determined. The treacle of Ruisdael’s water, as annotated by the wall, however, is described as in ‘good condition’. We should see water, and not oil.

Prefiguring any Romantic notion of ‘sublime’ experience as being terrified and in awe of nature, of reaching the limits of reason and rationality, Everdignen and Ruisdael’s work considers different neural-environmental connections. Water and rock and sky have no ego.

The late Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’ work offers a tenuous, though magnetic, lineation of environment, art, and verbal reasoning. On holding a leaf to a lecture hall in Oslo, Naess declared:

A landscape, a waterfall, a rock, a leaf, is enough. This ‘enough’, this unfidgety attention towards nature is a quiet, though effective, reassessment of human relationships with the environment. There is no space for ‘more’ or ‘less’ in ‘enough’. Such thinking led to Naess’ coinage of deep ecology: a rejection of man-in-environment proportionality for a ‘relational, total-field image’ of nature.

As Naess writes,

Naess’ words echo and shuffle five steps between the paintings of Room 15. ‘A Norwegian landscape’ and ‘Landscape with a waterfall’ evoke the difficult, deep yes. It occurs to me that the Fitz curator’s ‘Yes! Great idea! Let’s put these up in 15 – near the vases and the flower paintings…’ is a very easy yes to make. It’s a yes that brings us closer, however, to a deeper one. The moment where a shovel hits stone, a branch snaps, a foot skids in the mud.

It was enough to see these two paintings, to leave the museum, and to watch the sun set on the way home.