with Gary Hincks, 1985
lithograph in folder
48.5 x 2.5 cm
Johann Christian Reinhart, Rome, 1811
Johann Christian Reinhart was born in Germany in 1761 and died in Rome. A painter of ideal landscape, he was a friend of the German romantic poet Schiller, and of the German romantic artists Carstens and Koch. ‘Xaipe’, (Greek), inscribed by the spring, is ambiguous and may mean either ‘Hail’ or ‘Farewell’ – in the sense of a salute to the dead. ‘Ave’ (in the alternative version of the landscape) is the Latin form of ‘Xaipe’, and has the same ambiguity. The ‘W’ which precedes it (at an eccentric distance) allows both ‘Ave’ and ‘Wave’ – sometimes a synonym for water, as in Collins’s ‘Where slowly winds the stealing WAVE’, (‘Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson’). In Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta is a stone inscribed with the ‘one-word poem’ WAVE / Ave.
The ambiguity in ‘Xaipe’ (and ‘Ave’) seems to be affirmed by the contrast between the fallen stones on the left of the landscape and the stones placed slightly closer to the viewer and forming the spring on the right. That is, the left-hand group may correspond to ‘Farewell’ and the right-hand to ‘Hail’. The same ambiguity may be implicit in the gushing water – ‘It scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs.’ – Heraclitus.
