Landscape painting

• 1. Introduction

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  Landscape painting puts a wide view of natural scenery at the center of the work. Mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, forests, and almost always a stretch of sky, arranged into a coherent composition. Sometimes the land is the whole subject. Other times it sits behind figures, still doing important work. Yet detailed landscape did not appear everywhere. It tends to emerge only after a culture has already built a sophisticated way of representing other subjects first. Two great traditions carry this story, one from Western painting and one from Chinese art, each reaching back well over a thousand years. One of them treated the form as the lowest rung of art for centuries. The other crowned it as the most prestigious visual art a person could make. How did a few trees filling gaps in a medieval manuscript grow into what one writer called the chief artistic creation of an entire century? And why did a wrinkle of ink on silk come to matter as much as a brushstroke could? The word itself arrived late. It entered English as landskip, an anglicization of the Dutch landschap, around the start of the 17th century, used purely for works of art. Its first recorded use as a word for a painting was in 1598.

• 2. A Spiritual Idea

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  The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape sits at the very beginning of East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions. In the West, that same explicit spirituality only arrives with Romanticism, far later. This gap shaped how each region ranked the form. In the West, until the 19th century, landscape held a low position in the accepted hierarchy of genres. In East Asia, the classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most prestigious form of visual art. Aesthetic theory in both regions reserved the highest status for works that demanded the most imagination from the artist. In the West that meant history painting. In East Asia it meant the imaginary landscape. Its famous practitioners were, at least in theory, amateur literati, including several emperors of both China and Japan. They were often poets too, whose lines and images illustrated one another. Western theory found a workaround. History painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate. So for several centuries a landscape could be promoted to the rank of history painting simply by adding small figures to make a narrative scene, usually religious or mythological.

• 3. Earliest Views

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  The earliest art around the world shows little that could really be called landscape, offering only ground-lines and occasional hints of mountains, trees, or other natural features. The first pure landscapes with no human figures are frescos from Minoan art of around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes from Ancient Egypt, set among the reed beds of the Nile Delta, give a strong sense of place. Yet their emphasis falls on individual plant forms and on human and animal figures rather than the whole setting. The frescos from the Tomb of Nebamun, dated to around 1350 BC and now in the British Museum, are a famous example. A coherent whole landscape needs some rough system of perspective, a way of scaling for distance. Literary evidence suggests this first developed in Ancient Greece during the Hellenistic period, though no large-scale examples survive. Roman landscapes have lasted better, surviving from the 1st century BCE onward, especially frescos preserved at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere. Both the Roman and Chinese traditions favored grand panoramas of imaginary land, backed by spectacular mountains. In China these often came with waterfalls, in Rome with sea, lakes, or rivers. Bridging the gap between a foreground of figures and a distant vista was a persistent problem, and the Chinese style often solved it with dead ground or mist.

• 4. From Gardens To Genre

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  In early Western medieval art, interest in landscape disappears almost entirely. It survived mainly in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter, whose last reworking reduced once-extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps. A revival in the love of nature showed up first in small gardens, like the Hortus Conclusus and those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, with figures at work and play before dense trees, are probably a unique survival of a once-common subject. During the 14th century Giotto di Bondone and his followers began to acknowledge nature, introducing landscape as a background for the action of their figures. Early in the 15th century landscape became an established genre in Europe, often as a setting for a religious subject such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert. Luxury illuminated manuscripts mattered enormously here, especially the Labours of the Months in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which placed small genre figures in ever-larger settings. The artist known as Hand G, probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially skilled at light and at a natural progression from foreground to distance. Other artists struggled with this for a century or more, often dodging it by showing a landscape from over the top of a parapet, as if seen from a great height.

• 5. The World Landscape

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  Pure landscape drawings and watercolours appeared around the end of the 15th century from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Fra Bartolomeo, and others. Pure landscape in painting and printmaking, still small, was first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and the German Danube School in the early 16th century. The outsides of a triptych by Gerard David, dated to about 1510-15, are the earliest such works from the Low Countries, and possibly in Europe. Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed the world landscape, a panoramic style with small figures seen from a high aerial viewpoint, later perfected by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The Italian system of graphical perspective, now known across Europe, let artists paint large and complex views very effectively. Landscapes of this era leaned on a pastoral ideal drawn from classical poetry, first fully expressed by Giorgione and the young Titian. The look became tied to hilly wooded Italian country, painted even by Northern Europeans who had never set foot in Italy. Some made a living selling Italianate scenes without ever making the trip. Publication in Antwerp in 1559 and 1561 of two series totaling 48 prints, the Small Landscapes, after an anonymous artist called the Master of the Small Landscapes, marked a turn. It shifted attention toward close-up, eye-level views of identifiable country estates and villages, full of figures in daily life. By abandoning the panoramic viewpoint, the Small Landscapes set the stage for Netherlandish landscape painting in the 17th century.

• 6. The Dutch And English

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  Frans Post spent the rest of his life painting Brazilian landscapes after a trip there in 1636-1644, proof of the appetite for exotic scenes. Other painters who never crossed the Alps sold Rhineland views, and some built fantasy scenes to order, such as Cornelis de Man's view of Smeerenburg in 1639. Compositional formulae using elements like the repoussoir were evolved by Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both French artists living in 17th-century Rome. Unlike their Dutch contemporaries, Italian and French landscape artists usually kept their works classed as history painting by adding small figures from mythology or the Bible. Salvator Rosa added picturesque excitement with wilder Southern Italian country, often peopled by banditi. Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw landscape grow dramatically, with subtle realist techniques for light and weather. Most Dutch landscapes were small, made for smaller houses, while Flemish Baroque landscapes ran very large, above all in the works Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own homes. Period inventories name Dutch specialties such as the Maneschijntje, or moonlight scene, the Bosjes, or woodland scene, and the Dorpje, or village scene. Jacob van Ruisdael is considered the most versatile of all Dutch Golden Age landscape painters. In England, landscapes began mostly as backgrounds to portraits, suggesting a landowner's estate, though often painted in London by an artist who had never seen the rolling acres. The English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England.

• 7. Watercolour And Romance

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  Watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English specialty in the 18th century, sustained by a brisk professional market and armies of amateurs who followed popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. The watercolours sold relatively cheaply but were far quicker to produce, and professionals supplemented their income by training those amateurs. Leading figures included John Robert Cozens, Francis Towne, Thomas Girtin, and John Sell Cotman. By the start of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscape painters, among them John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and Samuel Palmer. All of them had trouble establishing themselves in a market that still preferred history paintings and portraits. As John Ruskin said, and Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century and the dominant art. The Romantic movement intensified the interest, pushing remote and wild scenery to the front. The German Caspar David Friedrich worked in a distinctive style influenced by his Danish training, to which he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism. From about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Barbizon School built a French landscape tradition that became the most influential in Europe for a century. With the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, landscape became for the first time the main source of stylistic innovation across all types of painting.

• 8. China And Beyond

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  Landscape painting has been called China's greatest contribution to the art of the world, owing its special character to the Daoist tradition in Chinese culture. William Watson noted that its role in Chinese painting corresponds to that of the nude in the West, a theme unvarying in itself but made the vehicle of infinite nuances of vision and feeling. The decisive shift to a monochrome landscape style, almost devoid of figures, is attributed to Wang Wei, who lived from 699 to 759 and was also famous as a poet. The best works of the Song dynasty Southern School, from 960 to 1279, remain among the most highly regarded in an unbroken tradition that continues today. Famous works accumulated red appreciation seals and added poems, and the Qianlong Emperor, who lived from 1711 to 1799, was a prolific adder of his own verses. The shan shui tradition, meaning mountain-water, was never meant to show actual locations, even when named after them, as in the convention of the Eight Views. Japanese art first adapted Chinese styles to suit its interest in narrative, seen in the long yamato-e scrolls illustrating the Tale of Genji. One scene from the Biography of the Priest Ippen comes from a scroll measuring 37.8 cm by 802.0 cm, one of twelve illustrating a Buddhist monk's life. From the late 18th century, landscape ukiyo-e developed under Hokusai and Hiroshige into much the best-known type of Japanese landscape art. Far to the west, the Persian miniature began its landscape tradition in the Ilkhanid period, largely under Chinese influence, favoring rocky mountainous country full of carefully depicted animals and plants.