Landscape Painting

LANDSCAPE ART

Since European painting arose during the Renaissance, landscape painting has been a part of Western art, but landscapes could be found in Italy, as well as Eastern Asia, many centuries earlier. Both the Chinese and the Romans welcomed the idea of artwork that celebrated nature and Roman landscapes are known to exist as frescoes and wall paintings in Roman villas, some that still stand.

The revival of art at the end of the Middle Ages celebrated Christianity but with the rise of wealthy cities as well as patrons, more secular forms of painting appeared although landscapes were mostly background for the burghers, patrons, popes and wives of the wealthy. As northern Europe became rich from shipping, Dutch, German and English painters, such as Albrecht Altdorfer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder worked impressive images of trees, mountains and countryside into their paintings. But it wouldn’t be until European man’s view of nature changed that landscape painting would become an important realistic genre.

Europeans had seen nature as an adversary in the attempt to civilize their lives but once the land was cleared and the trees were mostly gone, nature became a much more sympathetic subject. This sympathy was one of the attitudes found in the Romantic Movement that swept Europe in the first half of the 19th century. This sentimental, emotional secular belief came out of Germany and although the music of Beethoven and the books of Goethe and the Bronte sisters are what its most remembered for, landscape painting came to prominence because of the movement. The greatest practitioners were the English painters John Constable and J M William Turner but landscape painting also influenced the French at the time as artists like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted plein air and heavily influenced young painters like Claude Monet. His influential painting style would turn landscape painting into a revolutionary form and inspire the works that would give the name to the Impressionists.

With Monet and his school of plein air painting, landscape painting would help influence the followers of the Impressionists, such as the vivid expressionists like Maurice De Vlaminck and Vincent Van Gogh, both of whom would produce a number of landscapes between them and Paul Gauguin would paint the island of Tahiti.

In America, The Romantic movement took a great hold on the talents of its artists of the time. The Hudson River School and the Luminists celebrated the American landscape at a time when Americans’ were barely aware of what nature had provided their continent. Thomas Cole and Frederic Church were among several artists who brought the American Landscape to the world. American Impressionists who painted in a style similar to Monet would follow at the turn of the century.

Although landscape painting became less important in the 20th century, many forms of landscape painting now exist, such as marine painting, cityscapes, photorealist landscapes, mountain scapes and paintings of a variety of tourist themes. The earth art or land art, a form of conceptual art, can also be scene as a form of landscape art.

Recommended Landscape Art and Paintings

• Church on a Hill, Landscape Art

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting

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