“Guests of the Hills”

The Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art presents an exhibition from August 2008 to February 2009 titled “Guest of the Hills: Travelers and Recluses in Chinese Landscape Paintings.” The exhibition, to quote the Gallery’s description,

presents depictions of recluses and recreational travelers in Chinese landscape painting over a seven-hundred-year period, from the mid-eleventh to the mid-eighteenth century. Chinese landscape painting particularly appealed to members of the scholar-official class, who were intrigued by images of the free-roaming mountain sage or retired gentlemen living amid nature’s beauty. Other works depict actual excursions or journeys, or they were created as a gift for someone about to embark on a trip.

URL: http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/guests/htm#

Lucy Irvine, “hermit”

An update on Lucy Irvine is published in the Independent, describing briefly her activity since publishing Castaway, which described her 1981 adventure on a deserted island. Irvine lives in rural Bulgaria among hills and plum trees, and relishes her isolation, though she returns to the UK to publicize her latest book. For a time she fluttered between reclusion and notoriety, and her biography is an interesting one, as are her books, giving an unusual approach to reclusion perhaps akin to proverbial writers and occasional celebrities rather than monks and hermits — classic “reclusion.”

URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/lucy-irvine-hell-is-other-people-898978.html

Also Lucy Irvine’s web site: http://www.lucyirvine.com