These three pieces of arts journalism focus on landscape, mapping and science: on the emergence of the modern, scientific way of seeing nature

Landscape, mapping and science (1)
(Especially mapping)

Landscape, mapping and science (2)
(The emotional power of landscape)

Landscape, mapping and science (3)
(Turner seeing the science in nature)

Landscape, mapping and science (4)
Drawings from the 16th and 17th Centuries

Landscape, mapping and science (5)
(The Americans invent their landscape)

Landscape, mapping and science (1) (Especially mapping)
This piece on mapping was published in the Independent in January 1999

As the Institute of British Geographers gathers in Kingston University this week, they can reflect that their line of work has been, well, put on the map. Last year, the English Patient reduced the nation to a crumpled Kleenex as it told of a map-maker who had lost his way round his own history. A science writer, Dava Sobel, had a continuing hit with her "Longitude" which featured the 18th century clockmaker John Harrison's attempt to make a machine which could match the regularity of the stars the better to allow people to know where on earth they were. Thomas Pynchon makes energised fun of some of the same themes in his "Mason and Dixon" - the story of the ill-matched latitudinisers who marked the divide between Maryland and Pennsylvania. This was only after they had made an excursion to St Helena, the island observatory which for centuries starred prominently in the evolution of map-making and astronomy. It featured also in the imagination of Francis Godwin, the seventeenth century Bishop of Hereford whose account of a journey from St Helena to the moon (drawn by swans) was republished in 1996*. "The Man in the Moone" was the first sci-fi novel, claim its editors who also give a straightforward account of what it was likely the Bishop knew about the moon and its relations with the earth.

Why the interest? We know that the making of the modern depended in important degree on the exploration of physical spaces - and what those spaces meant to their European discoverers can best be seen in the way they drew the new territories. Three new books on mapping came out late last year, and they show that maps tell you as much about the people who made them, or for whom they were made, as they do about the terrain they appear to be about. Map-makers are charting the inside of their own heads. Jeremy Black makes the point: he is Professor of History (not, note, Geography) at Exeter University and his "Maps and Politics" (out last month**) discusses the way no map can be true: it is flat and smooth, whilst the world is round and bumpy. Map-makers use the fact to skew things whichever way their bosses want. Not, one imagines somehow, that Sir John Cotterell would have dared bully Claire Philp, the mapper of country estates, including his, in Herefordshire. She seems to pride herself on the absence of fancy in her exquisite detailing of other people's prized territory. Jerry Brotton's elegant "Trading Territories" *** shows how historically maps were about facilitating trade and celebrating (and exerting) influence. And he makes a fair case that modern research reveals what we had perhaps forgotten: the Ottoman empire could map and navigate pretty well, too.

Jeremy Black is a bit of a revisionist, thank goodness. He gently rebukes an 80s tendency to see map-makers as imperialists and propagandisers. He nicely points out that colonial England's OS insisted that Ireland be mapped with Gaelic names. Localised nomenclature was the rule at home, so it ought to be "overseas" too. He also remarks how difficult it is to make a map subtle. In maps as in parliaments, proportional representation is difficult. A political map of Scotland, for instance, would show a country dominated by Labour, but how to nuance the colouring properly to take account of other parties?

Increasingly, we see that maps really are about chaps. We want to map intangibles. Our forebears did, too. As a text-board for Hereford's newly-restored Mappa Mundi remarks: "the larger medieval world maps were visual encyclopaedias. They also located man in space and time, and in relation to eternity". Technology helps us do bits of this even better. Simon Rendel, who died terribly young last year, was a polymath landscape architect and used digitised information to map tranquility for the Council for the Protection of Rural England. He mapped things like roads, which loom larger on maps than they would on aerial photographs (that contributes to our obsession with them). Rendel had them loom larger yet: he coloured them in according to their busy-ness and their destruction of quiet. It was a work of genius: a portrayal of access was enhanced to show blight too. But maps are like that: marooned halfway between pictures and narratives they are best when they tell tales. Another revolutionary map-maker, Daniel Dorling, made his "New Social Atlas of Britain" (1995 ****) bulge and slenderise the country according to where the population was: we had the country redrawn to show us where the weight of opinion - quantitively - was.

A busy fellow, Black's "Maps and History" ***** was also out last year and it showed how our ancestors themselves mapped their own (and our own) ancestors. He notes how twenty years ago the "Times Atlas of World History" was the first to use the computer's ability to gives us really interesting, often skewed, perspectives. Mitchell Beazley's "Atlas of World Resources" was similarly rich in text and vignettes: the first environmental atlas and far better than various right-on attempts since, whose relative poverty Black notes. Dorling Kindersley have produced the nearest thing to a successor: their huge new World Atlas ("Mapping the world for the new Millennium", £45, slipcased) is so exciting it looks and reads like a multimedia.

One of the reasons maps are interesting now may be that we have noticed that geography and especially navigation don't matter to modern people. Perhaps the army had it right, as Henry Reed reported in his poem Lessons of the War: "... maps are of time, not space...". There are plenty of us who are unclear where Birmingham and New York are, but we know the journey time. I have travelled from New York to Washington several times and seen their relationship on a map dozens of times but I can never remember which is the more northerly.

I would make a useless Inuit. Two decades ago, the anthropologist Hugh Brody filled our heads with accounts of Inuit thinking in his "Maps and Dreams". It planted the idea that white map-makers drew much Inuit territory as a blank. Without maps, the Inuits had a far richer imaginative vision of their lands: names and distances and animal populations carpeted what was the white man's terra incognita.

Actually, it is a mistake to think that we have grown beyond geography. Vincent Ward made a wonderful film, "The Map of the Human Heart" ******, about a map-making aviator who takes a Inuit boy down to the city to cure him of TB. The Inuit becomes a warrior in Flying Fortresses but never re-integrates with his people's land or life. We meet him begging.

People who lose their place become indigent and mendicant. They wander in the creases in the map of civilisation. Like cowboys, having no single place, they seem blessed at least in being familiar with many. That is why we can expect to enjoy the work of the geographer Tim Cresswell, to be featured at the IBG's conference. His paper is called "Encoding the mobile body: the construction of the tramp". Its inclusion amongst many others which speak such language shows how far Geography has come.

* ed Andy Johnson and Ron Shoesmith, Logaston Press, Little Logaston, Woonton Almeley, Herefordshire HR3 6QH
** Reaktion Books, 11 Rathbone Place, London W1P 1DE, £19.95
*** Reaktion Books, £22.50
**** John Wiley, £55 01243 779777
***** Yale University Press, £25
****** Cinema Club, £5.49 from HMV Direct 0990 334578

Landscape, mapping and science (2) (Top)
The emotional power of landscape

A piece about scruffiness and the New Pastoral tagged to theatre, video and cinema events across the holiday season of Christmas 1997 for The Independent. It was pegged to the publication of a Ramblers' Association guide to seasonal walks.

For some people, a walk in the country is a sort of radicalism all by itself. They remember that the National Trust was co-founded by a Ruskinite clergyman [Claude Rawnsley] who led the first mass trespass in the Lake District. And then they recall the romantic socialists of the northern cities who went out onto moorland and braved the gamekeepers there.

Probably most people who take up the Ramblers' Festival of Winter Walks offer of routes, guides and company to help work off the Christmas torpor will do so for sheer pleasure, and perhaps with a bit of what the English rightly are shy of calling the "spiritual". Not going on the walks but imagining them is heady enough. Here is Cookham Dean (and thoughts of Stanley Spencer) or Buckinghamshire's Burnham (meet "end of Beeches Road, Farnham Common"). Anyone within a country mile ought to try to make the Abbeydore, Herefordshire event, beginning at the only roofed Cistercian Abbey in southern Britain. I am sorely tempted by Souldrop, Bedfordshire, simply by the promise of its name.

However, wherever people walk, they will find a terrain which actually is in hot dispute. Is that neat new crop of houses a disgrace? Should it have been built in the joke vernacular (very successfully adopted, by the way, in some infill near Abbeydore)? Can it be right that there is a small industrial estate in this field? Why on earth aren't there better car parking arrangements at this beauty spot? Why are there any at all?

William Waldegrave, one time Green minister, and a keen fan of the elegance of Britain's planning system, has been writing in the Telegraph about how messing about with the middle classes' extended garden - the countryside - may yet turn out to be New Labour's achilles heel. Increased urbanisation as we abandon the traditional family but instead spawn more than one family each, or none at all, will indeed impose tremendous strain.

So what else is new? Every generation has mourned the passage of the countryside of the day-before-yesterday. That is the message of the Pastoral, a literary and painting genre which is in the limelight at the moment. At the Royal National Theatre, Frank McGuinness has a powerful (and over-egged) piece about Edmund Spenser, England's great Elizabethan Pastoralist, in which the exiled poet wrestles with the supposed innocence of mythic Irish country-folk in dire need of "civilisation". Spenser does not notice the rustics are using him rather more cannily than he they. The problem is that nice aesthetic urban people (or "civilised" colonialists) want their nature and their natural people - the Pastoral - to stand about idly in a timewarp, in case they are wanted as a subject for admiration, or education. Rustic dynamism has always been a bit of an embarrassment to the simple-minded, and the rustic and primitive have always been best seen a metaphor for both balm and harm.

The civilised are necessarily voyeuristic when they consider the country. They are dangerously affected and fashion-conscious as they go about making the Pastoral take landscape form. So Tom Stoppard's hilarious Arcadia had an English aristocrat of the early 19th century rip up the Italian garden of her forebears to replace it with the latest thing, which is something much more expensive and a little more primitive. Oddly though, as the Villa D'Este gives way to the paintings of Claude as an inspiration - and formal gardens are swept away before the grand sweep of Capability Brown and then the arboured and laked vision of Repton - it remains only the Pastoral of Virgil which is being invoked in all the different styles.

So civilised people invent and reinvent Golden Age ruralities as waking dreams through which they can discuss what they have gained and lost, and in which they can create sanctuaries from the modern. Tom Stoppard's new creation, The Invention of Love, has A E Housman torn between the classical and the romantic, which are - roughly - the civilised and the wild. Worcestershire-born Housman's Shropshire Lad used the Pastoral manner as it always has been used: to discuss very civilised people getting to grips with natures (their own) as yet untamed. It was, like the vision from the Malverns in the Shropshire-born Langland's Piers Plowman, a conceit with which to talk about unmentionables. Stoppard's new play deals with the problem that clever romantic moderns would get locked up for classical (that is, civilised) behaviour (call it pederasty), just as his Arcadia discussed the way that romantic behaviour is often merely a neurotic response to being over-civilised.

The modern Picturesque - that 18th century halfway house between the wild and the prim - now takes in urban decay. The farouche Fiona Shaw is currently inhabiting a near-derelict music hall with her personification of T S Eliot's Wasteland. Its setting is as bleak as the limestone pavement invoked by McGuinness at the Cottesloe, and its style, for good and ill, is as frenetic as his. The Wasteland is about a rundown, listless London. The poem is an elegy for lost spiritual glamour, but faces a bit of a problem now. This is that the desolate, unreconstructed cityscape of which it speaks is now, like the old countryside, in such short supply that it has acquired a romance of its own.

Ideas such as this made Patrick Keiller's wonderful film, London, as gripping as it was static, deadpan and literary. Now his Robinson In Space, to be shown in January on BBC2 (and available on video), gives us an account of the hegemony beyond the M25 of the ersatz and the modern. Keiller sees the corporate sprawl of leisure parks and carparks, and a creeping disintegration elsewhere, as a troubling sort of public affluence in the midst of private squalor. It would be an odd Pastoral, except that its nostalgic tone is so familiar.

Mutabilitie was in repertory at the Cottesloe, RNT. The Invention of Love was in repertory at the Lyttelton, RNT. The Wasteland wasd at Wilton's Music Hall, Grace's Alley, Ensign St, E1. London, 1993 and Robinson In Space, 1997 dir Patrick Keiller, BFI/Connoiseur, £17.49 each available from HMV Direct, 0990 334578.

Landscape, mapping and science (3) (Top)
Turner, the enthusiast for science

In 1998, a major Tate gallery show, and another at the Dulwich picture gallery, brought out the painter Turner as "progressive" and an enthusiast for science.

A new Turner is appearing. He is the man who saw more clearly and painted - even celebrated - more certainly the Industrial Revolution than anyone else. Can it be? The Turner of sea and sky, the Romantic purveyor of the wild, in love with laboratories, furnaces and theorems? Well, yes, it can.

We wander round the Turner and the Scientists exhibition at the Tate, curated by James Hamilton (the part-time curator more usually of all the University of Birmingham's collections) and it seems obvious. "Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway" has it all: a fiery steam engine (its lollypop stick of a smokestack makes it comical only to us) charges across a bridge (now it looks quaint, then its archwork was a technical triumph).

Hamilton's catalogue makes the point that the depiction of big weather was far from coincidental. Brunel's critics had already predicted the bridge couldn't support a train, but it did, in July 1839. "There were exceptional storms the following autumn and winter, and the bridge was again widely expected to collapse, but it did not", writes Hamilton. Turner captures the triumph.

There are plenty of such images to make Hamilton's main point. This is that the first third of the Nineteenth Century saw a passionate spirit of fraternity amongst the best of the country's scientists and the best of its painters. They met at London clubs, such as the Athenaeum (Turner was a founder-member). Nearby, both sorts frequented the Royal Institution (devoted to the practical use of science) and the Royal Society (more devoted to pure science). The Royal Academy (for the arts) and the Royal Society then shared a building, Somerset House. Hamilton sees this as powerfully symbolic of the way men like Constable and Turner were constantly in touch with men of science such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy.

The vibrancy and vigour of it all is really inspiring. It had its practical side. The geologists, for instance, were delighted with painters and their quite new loves, accuracy and wild places: the best accounts of glaciers were in paintings (or there was Turner's fine depiction of the convulsive rocks of Lulworth Cove). The painters hung around chemists to inquire how make to better paints, around hydrologists to know how to codify weather better, and technologists who could suggest optical devices the better to get truly accurate accounts of their subjects.

But something rather unexpected comes through. This is that the both sets of people shared an intense romance about the understandings which were emerging. Turner's friend, the populariser of science, Mary Somerville, is typical in having a vision of the world which is giddy, almost unhinged, like an acid-head's or an adolescent's. In her "On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences", Chaos Theory is presaged and classical wisdom lurks: "In it [astronomy] we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything which exists on heaven or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a raindrop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon".

David Knight, of the University of Durham, the other day told a seminar at the Royal Institution, "Humphry Davy's vision was that forces, power and spirit matter more than matter itself". Justine Hopkins, of the University of Bristol, told the seminar how John "Mad" Martin (well and permanently represented at the Tate) painted an imagined world informed but also hugely revved-up by science.

But those early nineteenth century visions were powerful because they were dark as well as fiery. Davy himself is a fine example. Whilst still young he was ill and perhaps prey to the heightened awareness of those who face death. He produced intense poetic writing (hallucinatory, Hamilton calls it). The rise and fall of civilisations was one of his great themes. Many of Turner's paintings were accompanied by bits of his "The Fallacies of Hope", which turned gloomily on the transience of human enterprises.

So beyond the intensity of feeling common to scientists and artists of the period (and so unlike the frosty formality we wrongly attribute to our forebears), there is the very reverse of triumphalism. This makes a second exhibition, Italy in the Age of Turner, at the Dulwich Art Gallery, doubly interesting. It shows wave after wave of painter trekking south in the relatively new comfort of mass tourism. But the images we have from their sorties - the classical ruins, the picturesque in Italy's modern life - are only superficially about order or gaiety. The new tourists acquired sombre baggage too. The classical world had crumbled, its "project" (as moderns would say) vitiated. Its ruins were now inhabited by a superficially charming but actually beggardly and squalid people. That was part of the excitement of the Tour, Grand or otherwise: Venice, for instance, was a disturbingly over-sexed repository of high civilisation's relics. Modern scholarship (the Yale University Press catalogue is a particularly rich seam) shows us how high culture and low life were twin draws to travel, and that the "sublime" included an almost deliberately fevered - almost neurotic - response.

Right from the start the importance of Turner is that his work contains so turbulent a range of responses which nonetheless never seem close to toppling over into the grotesque. In "Rain, Steam and Speed", a hare is dimly seen, well, "haring" to escape the onrushing unnatural monster. Figures in a timeless pastoral scene are dimly seen, mourning or admiring the new iron age. In "The Fighting Temeraire" (in which a steam tug tows a sailing ship to the scrapyard) we can admire either vessel, at will and alternately. The horrors and the glories of war conducted under windpower are replaced by the brilliant but functional new arts of peace.

The good thing about the new insights is that they allow a thoroughly nuanced view of this almost unbelievably vigorous and exciting period in our cultural history. Take "Snow Storm - Steam-boat off a Harbour's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water and Going by the Lead", that most Turnerish of images, with the ship etched in a scene which is otherwise a mass of swirling sea and sky. Hamilton says that Turner's steam ships used to be taken as symbols of despair at modern man's hubris. "They aren't. The ships survive, they're getting through, they're coping. But it's not triumphalist, either". Other things in the show make the point: Turner liked life-saving devices - lighthouses, improved rescue kit - but didn't ever under-state the force of the natural world in which they were useful.

It was Stephen Daniels, a brilliant cultural geographer at Nottingham University, who first really put this sort of feeling on the map, in his book "Fields of Vision". He says, of both the artists and the scientists of the period, "There's always this millenarian undercurrent - that progress would over-reach itself, maybe things aren't going to reach upwards and onwards forever." Our own civilisation - gloriously technological and imperial - might collapse like all others before it. And the point is made whether capturing the vitality of an industrial furnace (as Turner often did), or painting a Roman ruin.

Daniels says, "You're still dealing with an age which took religion and myth seriously. They're in awe of the new power but they're worried what the implications are and that this whole thing might blow up in their faces."

For James Hamilton, 1837 - when the Royal Academy left Somerset House - symbolises the beginning of the end of this special age. "That year marks the beginning of the Tectonic Shift which saw Science and Art move apart from each other", he declared at the seminar. The main impetus was that science had now developed specialisms and specialist languages. It grows alienatingly complex.

Arguably, the two camps have not grown apart en masse, so much as fractured. The lines of contact are there, but complicated. Modern young artists are still wrestling with the relations of Man and Nature, and probably know as much science as anyone else. Even the project of Progress remains largely intact. What has gone is a clubbability, and encyclopaedism: that sense that a person can know everyone, and everything, that matters. And the most striking difference between then and now? Surely it is that we are so much less emotional?

Turner and the Scientists, Tate Gallery

Italy in the Age of Turner: "The garden of the world", Dulwich Picture Gallery

Landscape, mapping and science (4) (Top)
Drawings from the 16th and 17th Centuries

In a hushed library-like space, the British Museum's Room 90, there is the biggest show of drawings and prints by Claude Lorrain since 1927. These pictures were the passion of a handful of highly-educated and literary English connoisseurs for a century after about 1720. They are cheek by jowl with "Mantegna to Rubens", drawings from the Weld-Blundell collection, which was mostly brought together late in the 18th century by William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer and banker.

At first sight, there is something severely bibliophilic about loving drawings, and some of these do seem to be of only academic interest. Indeed, the catalogue for the Mantegna to Rubens show notes that "Roscoe considered himself first and foremost a literary historian, whose interest in art derived from the Italian poetry which he enjoyed reading. He often treated his drawings less as aesthetic objects than as historical documents."

Don't be deceived. Many of these things are very exciting because they give us a glimpse behind what can be the rather forbidding formality even of great classical painting. Drawings are like the "unplugged" versions of famous rock songs: bare and sinewy. A Claude sketch, say "Landscape with Brigands", is strikingly vigorous as compared with the etching for which it was a preparation. Drawings weren't always preparatory: some were an artist's record of a painting which was about to be sent off to a customer. We can think of them as an attempt to capture the essence of the fuller work, but done with an almost valedictory affection.

Drawings are timeless. Nothing else can make us feel so strongly that the human eye, brain and hand - our sensibility - can hardly have changed throughout the centuries. A student of Rembrandt's, for instance, sketches in a greedy landlord in "The Good Samaritan paying the innkeeper" just as the great English illustrator Ardizzone might have. Guercino "the Squinter" draws a plump Bathsheba or a sensuous St Sebastian with all the sexy insouciance of a Picasso or a Hockney.

Our taste for spontaneity is probably more attuned to the private aspirations of 17th century artists than was the aesthetic of their patrons. Martin Kisch of the British Museum's drawings and print department refers to our "impressionist eye". It is easy to imagine that the highly impressionist style of some of Claude's drawings ("A Grove in Shadow", say) was deliberate, an effect in itself, and not merely a shorthand.

Our modern pleasure in accurate depictions of nature and landscape also helps us respond to Claude's landscape drawings, in which trees, say, are far more realistic than the highly poeticised versions for which his paintings were adored at the time. This in spite of their contradictory freedom of execution. Some, like "Three Figures on the Banks of a River", are clearly rapid and shrewd in equal measure. Yet others, like "Travellers on a Road Below a Large Tree", seem to show us how Claude evolved a view which combined the accurate with the fantastic. In all these less finished works, we stand beside great technicians when they are at their least artful.

By the way, for a single visit to the vast BM drawings and print collection all you need is evidence of identification. And no-one minds whether you seek out these exquisite things because they appeal to an untutored eye or to an exacting scholarship.

Claude Lorrain: Drawings from the British and Ashmolean Museums

Mantegna to Rubens: Drawings from the Liverpool's Weld-Blundell Collection

Both at Room 90, British Museum, London

Landscape, mapping and science (4) (Top)
The Americans invent their landscape

This was written in Autumn, 1996

Weekending amongst American art in New York and Washington

The moment I knew I'd be spending time out of time days in New York and Washington, it was obvious how every spare moment would best be filled. Good old-fashioned art: that would be the goal. And in particular: American art. By the standards of the ex-colony, I would be looking only for old and oldish indigenous painting. Since I could not travel to the pine-bristling, bare-boned Rockies, or saunter through Arizona's Saguaro cactus, nor make what would be my first visit to any US coastline - why not make mini-pilgrimages through the eyes of painters?

I can't remember when the luxury of travel first became identified in my mind with the joy of stealing afternoons in art museums: but it has certainly surprised me. It is one of the various things about deep adulthood which one didn't anticipate as a young person. As a youngster, I thought pleasure would always be nursing a hangover and smoking a Gauloise whilst drinking marc in Paris. My dream at twenty five, not fulfilled for ten years, was to stay up all night dancing to reggae in New York. A decade or so ago, a Burning Spear concert, supper at the Algonquin, bed and breakfast at the West Side YMCA, bus rides hither and thither, all planted an enduring impression that sampling New York life was pretty easy as well as exciting. The message has stayed sound. Tastes change, though. This time, we trekked downtown to the renowned Village Vanguard jazz club, and heard rather a pompous pianist. Still, it's the place to be - and yes, amiable as well as venerable.

I would once have liked to become the sort of New Yorker for whom there is only one - dark - 12 o'clock a day. Now, at fifty, even in New York I am happy to be early to bed, and to read gallery catalogues there, even in a hotel a step away from pulsating night-life. This time it was in the skyscraper Millennium, off Broadway. The style was minimalist post-Modern Art Deco, the sort of room Italians are comfortable in. A bit like sleeping a Conran restaurant. The hotel's residential floors are very high, and approached through a security cordon which makes the kind of arrangement normal in Lagos look simply amateur.

I thought it was asking a bit much to have to be deathlessly cool for breakfast in the hotel's lobby, amongst fellow guests who seemed languidly to be recovering from massive implants of chic, and slipped off to a diner to escape the challenge and the prices. The policeman on Times Square - posted as a sort of tourism officer with hardware - couldn't help with locating a liquor store for the obligatory gin for later (no level of security has ever stopped me brown-bagging in hotel rooms). Said he was a stranger to the district, as a Chelmsford probationer on duty in Piccadilly Circus might. But he indicated a decent greasy spoon.

I have given up trying to like anything about American coffee except the way in good bad places a tired waitress cruises the tables with jugs of it. That is a scene which reminds me always of luminously sad movies with the likes of Ellen Burstyn or Susan Sarandon or Michelle Pfeiffer. The fastfood waitress is to modern America what the prairie Madonna was to its frontier years, only she must of course be not merely a person of stamina, but also crucially dysfunctional. She is (to look at it in art terms) your Edward Hopper cafe subject compared with your Wyeth farmyard figure. Anyway, this time round, I drank tea even in dim places off Broadway, and was rather proud of my independence of spirit.

A bus uptown, shared with sharp little ladies who might have been trekking up the Finchley Road, and I popped into a refreshingly run of the mill Indian joint on Columbus at about West 77th, before the rush of the day, and had a leisurely collation of rice pudding made foreign, or ethnic as a properly politicised New Yorker would probably have called it, by a sprinkling of cinnamon. The sun was bright on the Saturday edition of the New York Times. I am always amazed at the weightiness of American journalism: it seems so Dutch, somehow, so tremendously worthwhile. As a tourist that Saturday, I read the paper with affectionate condescension and then calculated that the doors of the New-York Historical Society (the hyphen denotes the class of an institution founded in 1804) would open. It's on the west side of Central Park, at about the latitude of the Metropolitan art gallery.

The doors weren't open, so I sat on the august stoop and rolled a cigarette and watched joggers and wondered why upmarket city dwellers of a particularly flaky kind always have enormous dogs - just as people they'd hate at the opposite end of the social scale and town also do.

The N-YHS has a big heavily-serious but airy building and gratifyingly little, mostly nice, in it. I was there to see a series of paintings by Thomas Cole, an Englishman who learned his painting in America and became closely associated with the businessman in whose house the artist's grand but eccentric series, The Course of Empire, still hangs. The paintings show man's relationship with the landscape from Wildernesss, through Arcadia, to Civilisation and its inevitable descent into chaos, when Nature's orderly disorder reasserts itself over the ephemeral empire of human ruins. In New York, where civilisation, as Edith Wharton might have noted as easily as Scorsese, is noisily assertive but precarious, one looks at these exciting but oddly inept paintings with specially attuned eyes. They are a noble part of the American painterly discussion about the rights of man to see himself as doing good, or God's, work in taming nature.

To enjoy galleries, it is very important to go at the pace one wants. One must not be above loitering in cafes to rest one's feet, nor of taking the gallery experience itself at a fair clip. It is best in big galleries to take in only what one expects to enjoy, and perhaps challenge oneself with an improving sample of what one expects to hate, and boldly to ignore the rest. The great trick before going to galleries abroad is to go to the National Gallery in London: that leaves one free to be cavalier with overseas offerings which will only replicate much of the experience to be found in Trafalgar Square. It is also important to buy postcards: they are cheap but exquisite souvenirs of those intense, compromised moments before paintings (good or bad) when one was transported away from tiredness, aching feet, plotting the venue for lunch or supper. They constitute the best and most effective apology for moving quickly on when one should have lingered.

For good or ill, and I can't help it, paintings are in effect icons for me. I don't mean this in a weak way. I mean that paintings have become the equivalent of graven images - they induce something like prayer in a heart which can't quite reconcile itself to a world which is supposed to be secular. Even so, the trick to surviving the Louvre, or the Accademia, or the Metropolitan or the Corcoran, is to adopt a superficially brisk air toward the whole thing.

In New York, a tiny group of fans was guided round the American sections of the Metropolitan by a woman of the kind America does very well. The type is grand, cool, and girlish in the unspoilable way of our own mature Sloane Rangers, but with a dash of briskness and bandbox neatness which comes from having been brought up on Doris Day movies. We saw what one would expect in the way of recreated Colonial homes, and not very good portraits of early notables. The stuff I have come to love is the landscapes of the Nineteenth century. I have been taught to see the paintings as being in the tradition of Claude and Constable. Even the wildest scenes seem to discuss man's role in nature. By the way, Wharton made a remark about American art to the effect that it had no foreground because the Americans had no background. That's to say: they painted landscapes because they had no society.

On the western side of the Atlantic, instead of the Alps, they have the Catskills (I still don't know quite where they are); instead of fenlands they have prairies; instead of the Thames, they have the Hudson. The seascapes (say of Winslow Homer) are as raw-boned and burly as anything done by the Skagen school in Denmark about the same time - or our own Newlyn school.

The Americans were painting what they saw. But there's more to it than that. They were trying to work out what America should look like.

In Washington, we stayed at the Willard. A stone's throw from the White House, the hotel is famous as one of the first grand places in the US. It's nearly as grand as the capital's Union Station, whose general elegance and food mall add glamour to the rail corridor connecting New York and Washington. In a previous Willard, built on the same site, the Battle Hymn of the Republic was written; in the last days before the present building's descent into scruffiness and eventual collapse as a business, Martin Luther King wrote his "I have a dream" speech there. It was restored in the 80s as part of Washington's attempt to make its central area worthy of a great nation. The result is a hotel which does quite successfully reproduce an air of Edwardian grandeur with just a hint of the raffishness which should attach to place where power has been brokered. I liked both the coffee house and the infinitely grand dining room breakfasts, but could not bring myself to dine in so august a spot. We grabbed a taxi down to Georgetown where, in a place called Au Pied du Cochon, I enjoyed a better-than-basic meal in a room which was good to look at. But the memory is seared in my mind because eating at a nearby table - gourmandising would be a better word - was a Charles Laughton amongst women: an Emperor Claudius, perhaps, of her sex. I rather fell in love. It was that sort of weekend: in New York, I enjoyed squeezing into the Hourglass, one the world's smaller restaurants, wherein we were served by a waitress who would not have struck one as petite in an aircraft hangar.

In one of the Willard's public rooms there is a reproduction of one of Thomas Eakins' great rowing pictures. Eakins loved boats to very powerful artistic effect. But it is his portraits which make him perhaps America's greatest artistic product. His women convey pained sorrowfulness verging on resentment; his men mournful deliberation trailing melancholy. It is not a happy view of the world, but it is grand and serious. Eakins' are everywhere in galleries in the eastern US.

One of the advantages of America's being young, and until recently too busy to produce many dilettantes, is that you can quickly achieve a kind of intimacy with most of the work that's been produced. What you see in the big art books, you will shortly see on the walls. The further west you go, of course, the more cowboys and Indians you see. In Forth Worth, Denver or Chicago, these predominate, and often are familiar. In Philadelphia, Washington and New York you come up against the same painters, the same scenes and argument, as amongst old friends. There is the comforting feeling that your conversation with the important artistic sensibilities of the place can quickly be renewed. Of course, for light relief you might prefer to be reminded that one can cop out and soak up the John Singer Sargents - those fine swagger portraits of beauties, who look, somehow, as though they were no better than they ought to be. Or the painting of Cecilia Beaux: achingly expressive, covertly erotic, and much less known.

From the door of the Willard, it's a totter to the defining galleries of (pre-modern) America - the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran, The National Museum of American Art, the last twinned with the National Portrait Gallery. There may not be quite the richness of plunderings from Europe's earlier heritage which is to be had at the Metropolitan, but in Washington there is wall upon wall of America's own. After the Corcoran (which makes you feel as you might have been the donor himself, so intimate is the impression it makes), I like the National Portrait Gallery best. Like England's, it is something of a backwater. Relentlessly trivial, my carry-home impression was of a Second World War General wearing the kind of blouson leather jacket which I have always wanted and which no senior Brit could wear now let alone fifty years ago.

And here too is a painting of 19 American inventors - "Men of Progress". It is of eager types, earnest and well set-up looking. Some of their names speak of their inventions: Morse, Colt, Goodyear, McCormick. But the stories of all of them - of debt, depression and sudden wealth and fame, or suicide - make a wonderful happenstance. From fountain pen to anaesthetic, one feels the modern age got made by those hands. Some of its better characteristics were formed by Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of America, whom one does not expect to be half as winsome as she appears in the fine painting by Edward Hughes.

Washington Galleries:

National Gallery of Art, 4th & Constitution Ave, NW. National Portrait Gallery 8th and F St, NW. National Museum of American Art, 8th and G St, NW. The Corcoran Museum of Art, 17th and New York Ave NW.