The next photograph after that is another house: Wentworth Place, where John Keats live. We visited it on a sunny Spring day last year but in Brandt’s photograph all is dark, except for one partially open window - Keats's room. The accompanying text quotes a letter to Fanny - 'come round to my window for a moment when you have read this' - and lines from 'Ode to Psyche': 'A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm love in.' Looking at this I started to feel that the photographs of houses were just as interesting as the landscapes in their own way. Turning back to the image of Johnson's house, you see the same aesthetic of simplified forms and strong shadows that Brandt uses in his landscapes, and notice details that start to seem suggestive of the writer - a sturdy white structure with three classical pillars but an asymmetric roof and a set of windows with small rectangular panes that resemble rows of books.
In Romantic Moderns Alexandra Harris writes about the pains Brandt took to get just the right conditions, travelling with heavy equipment and waiting for the perfect weather conditions. ‘Reclaiming the pathetic fallacy, he ensured that each writer got the weather he deserved … Literary Britain is a catalogue of English weather: D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood terrace is slushy with half-thawed snow, menacing clouds hang suspended over Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, and an ecstatically illuminated mist fills Anthony Trollope’s cathedral.’ The last image of the six above is Top Withens, the supposed location of Wuthering Heights, which Brandt first tried to capture in 1944. “I went to the West Riding in summer, but there were tourists and it seemed quite the wrong time of year. I liked it better misty, rainy, and lonely in November. But I was not satisfied until I saw it again in February. I took the picture just after a hailstorm when a high wind was blowing over the moors.” And yet even this was insufficient, so Brandt superimposed a sky from a different photograph, ‘over-exposing both negatives so that the moorland earth became impenetrably black, pitted with the spectral white of the settled hailstones.’
