6 to escape their attention—Tony has pursued all of the elements of air, water, earth, and fire, often in their most dramatic and spectacular combinations. Watching him rise to these challenges is to be reminded, once again, that he is first and foremost an artist whose chosen form of expression is pictorial. Even the most basic dictionary definition of beauty is likely to give rise to disagreement, and in the twentieth century the very idea of beauty, let alone the association with virtue that has persisted in Western philosophy ever since it was first made by Aristotle, was either questioned or rejected by many artists as well as philosophers. More recently, however, attempts have been made to counteract the anti-aesthetics of postmodernism with new theories of beauty, such as the one proposed by the California philosopher Guy Sircello in his study of 1975. Sircello argued for the perception of beauty as objective rather than subjec- tive, returning to a position not too distant from that of the seventeenth-century empirical philosopher John Locke, for whom “beauty consists of a certain composition of colour and figure, causing delight in the beholder.” I doubt that Tony is particularly interested in abstract theorising when, as far as he is concerned, beauty exists in plentiful supply in the natural world and serves as his source of inspiration. “I suppose all my work is about beauty,” he has said to me, confess- ing that a New York art dealer once told him that it was “too beautiful.” No wonder then that he decided to tackle the subject head-on, by undertaking a new series of journeys with the help of his “luminaries.” Asked by John Halkes what united his subjects, irrespective of their scale, Tony replied that “all of them have the germ of the idea of wildness about them.” From the minutiae of Tywardreath Marsh to the sweeping vistas of the Atacama Desert, “you’ll find that there are some extraordinary things there to see.” And of course he sees them, with the tenacity of the time, to pick up the trail of the Scottish American explorer and naturalist John Muir, who proclaimed the “divine beauty” of the Sierra Nevada and advised his fellow Americans to “climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” Muir too was aware of the dangers of development and exploitation; it was as a direct result of his activities that Congress created the first of America’s national parks, Yosemite, in 1890. I remember joining Tony and his wife, Ann, in Washington, DC, for the opening of John Muir’s High Sierra at the National Museum of Natural History, of all the venues for the exhibition the most appropriate, honouring both the “father of the national parks” and his contemporary champion, who defends the restric- tions placed by the present-day National Park Service on access to some of the most environmentally sensi- tive sites under its control. In Tony’s own words, “We cannot continue to use the world as if ours is the only generation that needs it.” In all of his subsequent forays into increasingly remote and inaccessible regions, he has never lost sight of their vulnerability, recognising that “many poorer places are protected simply because at the moment it is impractical or unprofitable to exploit them.” Without for one moment abandoning these princi- ples, Tony’s attention as an artist was drawn increas- ingly to “bigger subjects,” starting with the Grand Canyon. I have written before about his extraordinary achievement in capturing the essence of that most spectacular of natural phenomena, which has chal- lenged and defeated so many attempts to describe it in words and images. Who would have thought that Tony’s sharply focussed eye for detail would succeed in representing that awe-inspiring sense of almost lim- itless space where many a broad brush and wide-angle lens has failed? Since then—inspired, I suspect, by past masters of landscape painting like Turner, for whom no natural effect, however elusive, was allowed sees it.” Thanks to Tony, our eyes too are opened, not only to the natural beauty he captures in his meticu- lously rendered observations of nature but also to the meanings and the implications of the landscapes that lie on the precarious edges of the world that he has revealed to us. It might be useful at this point to retrace his steps as passionate sight/site seeker/seer. They began in 1982, when he and the photographer James Ravilious set out to follow in the footsteps of the nineteenth- century writer Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was published just over a century earlier, in 1879. It was, in a sense, a romantic journey, on foot, in search of a lost past, but it led in short order to another venture, also inspired by a writer. In 1984 Tony “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” When Henry David Thoreau penned those words in 1854, Walden Pond was far enough away from Boston for him to feel isolated there, but behind them lay the tacit assumption that they offered an alternative to day-to-day life in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Wordsworth “wandering lonely as a cloud,” Thoreau did so knowing that the countryside to which he went to “live deliberately” was threatened by the forces of progress in an increasingly industrial- ised society. His experiences away from it all radical- ised him, turning him into an environmentalist before his time. No wonder Tony took up his cause and set off on a series of journeys through the remoter parts of New England, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and by canoe along the Concord River and into the Maine wilderness. Two years later, in 1986, increasingly aware that “no-one can spend long periods of time in these places without becoming concerned for their protection,” Tony took what for him was the logical next step. He returned to the United States, to the West Coast this
