Short answers, pulled from the story.
Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in painting of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view arranged into a coherent composition. Sky is almost always included, and weather is often an element. Landscape can also serve as an important background for figures.
The word landscape entered English as landskip, an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art. Its first use as a word for a painting was in 1598, and within a few decades it described vistas in poetry and eventually real views.
The two main traditions of landscape painting spring from Western painting and Chinese art, each going back well over a thousand years. A spiritual element appears in East Asian landscape from its beginnings, drawing on Daoism, while in the West that spirituality becomes explicit only with Romanticism.
The earliest pure landscapes with no human figures are frescos from Minoan art of around 1500 BCE. Earlier art around the world shows little true landscape, offering only ground-lines and occasional hints of mountains, trees, or other natural features.
In the West, landscape painting held a low position in the hierarchy of genres until the 19th century, while in East Asia the classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most prestigious visual art. Both regions gave the highest status to works requiring the most imagination, which in the West meant history painting and in East Asia meant the imaginary landscape.
In China, the monochrome landscape style is attributed to Wang Wei, who lived from 699 to 759, and the Song dynasty Southern School from 960 to 1279 remains highly regarded. In the West, leading landscape painters include John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, Caspar David Friedrich, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.