Landscape Painting

Landscape Painting, the art of depicting natural scenery in painting. In the East, particularly China, it has long played a central role in art, but in the Western world it did not become a separate branch of painting until the 16th century, and was initially considered of less importance than figure painting.

Landscape elements existed in ancient Egyptian and Greek art, but only as a setting for some other subject. The Romans seem to have been the first to enjoy landscape in painting for its own sake. They showed a great love of the countryside in their poetry, and in the 1st century ad Pliny the Elder wrote of the “fashion of painting walls with pictures of country houses and porticoes and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fish-ponds, canals, rivers, coasts”. A few fragments of such paintings have survived from Pompeii (which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ad 79).

In the Middle Ages, when art was almost exclusively religious, landscape occurred only very occasionally in painting, as an incidental feature. From about the 14th century, however, it began to assume a more prominent place in art. Religious scenes were increasingly set in the real world (reflecting the new joy in nature that St Francis of Assisi introduced to Christianity as well as the scientific spirit of observation typical of the Renaissance). The first picture in Western art to depict a scene recognizable as a real place is generally agreed to be The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva, 1444) by the Swiss painter Conrad Witz, which depicts part of Lake Geneva, and the earliest surviving European paintings to depict pure landscape, without any figures, are usually credited to the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer (an example, the St George altarpiece, c. 1520, is in the National Gallery, London).

By 1600 landscape had become established as an independent branch of art. Initially it was more popular in northern Europe and the word “landscape” (“landschap”) was first used in Dutch; it entered the English language (as “landskip”) in the late 16th century. The first great flowering of landscape painting was in 17th-century Holland, an expression of the pride in their country felt by the Dutch, who had recently won independence from Spain. Jacob van Ruisdael is regarded as the greatest of all Dutch landscape painters, but he had many distinguished contemporaries. Dutch landscapes were usually naturalistic, but in Italy another tradition developed, known as the “ideal landscape”. In this, the elements of nature were arranged into very grand, formalized compositions, used as settings for figures from mythological or religious subjects. The ideal landscape was invented by Annibale Carracci in the first decade of the 17th century and its most famous exponents were Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, French painters working in Rome. It was a highly popular and influential type of art, being adapted to British scenery, for example, by the 18th-century painter Richard Wilson, the first major British artist to specialize in landscape.

The ideal, or “classical”, type of landscape continued to flourish in the 19th century, but other approaches also emerged, notably in the work of Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and J. M. W. Turner in Britain, who emphasized the awesome and mystical aspects of nature. A similar spirit, and also a patriotic desire to glorify their country, is seen in the work of several American painters of the 19th century, such as the members of the Hudson River School and Rocky Mountain School. They were often inspired by spectacular mountain scenery. At the same time painters such as Corot in France and Constable in Britain enriched the classical and naturalistic traditions with a new spirit of loving, unpretentious observation. Their work influenced the Impressionists, who helped to establish landscape as perhaps the most popular branch of painting. In the 20th century landscape continued to be a favourite subject for artists working in more or less traditional styles and also formed the starting point for avant-garde developments, including abstract compositions and Surrealist fantasies.