Landscape painting

Landscape Painting depicts the scenery of the natural world with the views that impact the artists's eye. In an effort to represent the beauty that meets the eye, the artist tries to capture that fleeting moment in time and space, for all time, thus becoming a co-creator along with the original Creator. In these visions may be; endless skies or no sky, clouds of every strata, stars and planets, vistas of mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes and plains, all forms of vegetation, flora and fauna, deserts and oceans, etc. Also may be contained, in a single scene; humans and habitats, conveyances, wagons to ships, aircraft to automobiles, any may play a part. Weather is decidedly a large element of the composition; be it calm and serene, threatening and dramatic, clear or shrouded in mists with sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, or other phenomena that may also add to the portrayal with, most of all, light. There may or may not be form and color, for even the lack of it shows the artist's perception of the quest for artistry. Moreover, from the point of view of the public there is the subtle difference of the merely pictorial and the melding of the artist's own sensibilities and creativity.

The Background of Landscape painting

"Landscape is a state of mind." Swiss essayist, Henri Frederic Amiel, 19th Century.

The effect of light plays an important role in viewing the landscape and we can say that these painters are also painters of light. It has been said that the overall flood of constant heat and light in the Orient created the monochromatic styles there and their use of the line as a graphic description. In Europe the ever shifting seasons and subtleties of changing, suffused light, created a very different style of painting, championed by artists such as the Impressionists, WJM Turner and the Luminists. Light may also have an emotional effect and has been used to create moods that the artist desired in the landscape.

In Western art, Landscape Painting before the sixteenth century, with few exceptions, such as wall pictures in the Hellenistic period, have been mostly a decorative backdrop until the seventeenth century when serious artists of 'pure' landscape were active. Even then, they were thought of as very low on the scale of subject matter, second only to the flowers and fruit varieties.

The oldest recorded views in the West were cut into rock at Valcamonica, near Lake Guarda, Italy, some 2000 years B.C.E. However, these are geometric and not regarded strictly, as art. The pre-classical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Agean had landscape motifs that are considered art. The Hellenistic period, shows us the first known paintings of a more naturalistic nature.

In the first century C.E., Roman frescoes of landscapes decorated rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum and the first of 'pure' landscapes.

Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes and starscapes for example.

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Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, c. 600.

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Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors

Willard Leroy Metcalf, Indian Summer, Vermont. Metcalf painted large scale landscapes en plein-air.

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Jane Frank (Jane Schenthal Frank, 1918-1986), Aerial Series: Dorado no. 2, 1970: An example of aerial landscape art, acrylic and mixed materials on apertured double canvas, 35"x47". Notice that in this kind of landscape, there is no horizon and no sky.

The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the late 17th century.

The Chinese tradition of "pure" landscape, in which the minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the viewer to participate in the experience, was well established by the time the oldest surviving ink paintings were executed.

In Europe, as John Ruskin realized, and Sir Kenneth Clark brought to view, in a series of lectures to the Slade School of Art, London, that Landscape Painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", with the result that in the following period people were "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity" In Clark's analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches:

By the acceptance of descriptive symbols,

By curiosity about the facts of nature,

By the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature,

By the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.

He said that, 'we are surrounded by things which we have not made and which have a life and a structure different from our own and for centuries have inspired us with curiosity and awe.' He continued to say that, 'Landscape Painting marks the stages in our conception of nature. It's rise and development since the Middle Ages is part of a cycle in which the human spirit attempted once more to create a harmony with its environment.' Sir Kenneth also wrote that, 'landscape painting was an act of faith and in the early nineteenth century as values declined, faith in nature became a form of religion.' and 'Almost every Englishman when asked what he thought was meant by the word 'beauty' would begin to describe a landscape.'

Sir Kenneth also wrote that Rouseau's ideal of total immersion, could be seen in the paintings of both William Turner and Claude Monet.

In a book on the phenomena of Krakatoa, (The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester) the volcanic eruption that could be heard clear across the world, the writer states that "Art was born out of the after-effects of this volcano." After millions of tons of dust were hurled into the air in the East Indies, it disseminated around the world for many years and extraordinary sunsets were seen in unusual colors and hues exciting many landscape painters. One of those was, Frederic Edwin Church, a member of the Hudson River School, an American nineteenth-century painting group. Sunset Over the Ice on Chaumont Bay, Lake Ontario, a watercolor, is said to be the only major painting made after the immediate aftermath of the explosion and stands as vivid testimony to the great eruption. His oil, Twilight in the Wilderness, also has unusual richness of color. J.M.W. Turner the great English master-painter, was also thought to have been influenced by these unusual effects and is famous for painting evening skies colored in the aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Tambora, an earlier but not as lethal eruption. A lesser artist, William Ashcroft, who lived on the River Thames in Chelsea, London, painted some five hundred, plus, watercolors and made notes of the unique tints in the sunsets, for several months. These were shown in exhibition but then locked away in the Natural History Museum, in London, almost forgotten.

Chinese Landscape and Philosophy

Chinese painters over a period of fifteen centuries have developed certain methods that are meant for the beginner to learn and practise before any creative departures. The evolution of Chinese painting over many centuries has been continuous whilst making some adjustments for certain other influences. It has established strong traditions and a self generating force. The simple use of brush and ink on absorbent paper in monochromatic forms and voids coupled with an exclusive choice of subjects from nature form the basis for this language of art. For thousands of years the Chinese people have been farmers struggling with the changes in nature until they began to seek a way of attunement with those forces which became eventually the philosophy of Tao or the Way. a fundamental notion that nature and humanity are one. So, artists aspired also to become one with nature, superceeding other forms such as figure painting. As a result Chinese painting came to have universal appeal. The artist intends the landscape not just for viewing but for a more spiritual journey.

Japanese Painting Traditions

As nearly all forms of art, Japanese early painting had been under the influence of the Chinese culture. By and by, new and specifically Japanese styles were developed and painting schools were established. Each school practized their own style. But the Chinese influence remained strong until the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1867). There is a general term to describe painting in Japanese style - yamato-e.

Painting Schools and Styles

• Suibokuga or Sumi-e, is the term for painting in black ink. It was adopted from China and strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism. During the 15th century ink painting gained a more Japanese style of its own.

• Kano Masanobu (1453-1490) and his son Kano Motonobu (1476-1559) established the Kano painting school. It began as a protest against the Chinese ink painting technique in black. The Kano school used bright colors and introduced daring compositions with large flat areas that later should dominate the ukiyo-e designs. The Kano school split into several branches over the time, but remained dominant during the Edo period. Many ukiyo-e artists were trained as Kano painters.

• The nanga painting style was strong at the beginning of the 19th century during the bunka and bunsai era. The advocates of this style painted idealized landscapes and natural subjects like birds and flowers for a cultural elite. The style was rather Chinese.

Japanese painters used a wide variety of media over the centuries. The only one you will not find until the late nineteenth century, is the Western media of the framed canvas.

Japanese paintings may evoke an association with landscapes and natural scenes drawn with a few simple brush strokes.

European Painting

Nature as Divine Power

Early in the fifteenth century, Landscape Painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert.

With Christian religion came the idea of nature as a manifestation of divine power. This led to the symbolic view of nature, from the 'real to the 'unreal' landscapes of Byzantine art. Later the first realistic scapes came from Siena, with Ambrogio Lorenzettis' frescoes. Avignon was also a center of factual landscape detail in the decorative walls at the Palace of the Popes, 1343. In the north, in France and Burgundy. manuscripts such as the Tres Riches Heures by the Duke of Berry (Book of the Hours) created as seasonal calendars and painted by artists from the Low aCountries showing nature in miniature perfection and this style inspired the Italians.

The Northern or Gothic style

In the North, Gothic painters such as Jan van Eyck could give their landscapes luminosity whilst others, a sharp exactitude. A hard crisp style, as with Robert Campin's work, after Pol de Limburg and this worked well to depict harsh wintry scapes. Albrecht Durer's topographical scenes, around 1494, show an intense uncompromising gaze and his drawing of Innsbruck is perhaps the first real portrait of a town.

Flemish does not always mean naturalistic. When we witness the works of Hieronymus Bosch, for example, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503-4, Oil on wood, we see a world purely of the imagination, made from religious faith. He was to portray both, Heaven and Hell.

Geographically, Romanticism is a Northern extreme and Classicism, a Southern. This has a lot to do with climate and light and the artists's reaction to it. Of course, the styles may be fused in the best of those artists.

The Renaissance

In Italy, Giovanni Bellini was perhaps the first to mold all the varying styles of precision and mastery of light into one harmonious whole with man, nature and his environment seen on equal terms. The Renaissance produced both Christian and Pagan symbols along with Classical mythology, to praise man rather than any one system. A shift from divine to earthly love is shown in portrayals by both Botticelli and Titian. Artists began to look at the landscape in a much more studied and scientific way, tired of the old symbolic representations of nature. Leonardo da Vinci studied closely and drew, rocks and the way water and clouds move and botanicals among other subjects, in his Notebooks.

Whilst Northern painters such as Hubert van Eyck intuited the natural regression in space, a rational Italian, an architect, Brunelleschi, created scientific perspective with strict laws of vanishing points and upright verticals, to control use of space. Paradoxically, the ancient Chinese had the exact opposite way of working. Florence discovered perspective which organized space, whilst the Netherlands discovered light, which unified it. Masaccio and the van Eyck brothers were the chief exponents of this.

'Mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere between your eye and them, will appear blue', writes Leonardo da Vinci, in the Notebooks. We witness the luminous mists on rocky mountains in his Mona Lisa, 1505, Oil on wood.

Piero della Francesca with his simple control of form and beautifully balanced picture of the world, Allegorical Triumph of Battista Sforza, Tempera and oil on wood, was able to combine both Flemish and Florentine styles. Andrea Mantegna, Landscape with a Castle Under Construction, Fresco, showed how perspective could give sculptural depth and drama to a picture. Giorgione, 1478-1510, the master of the poetic landscape, displayed great painterly skill along with an ambiguous dream like quality, as in, The Three Philosophers, 1508-9, Oil on canvas. Raphael's Madonna di Foligno, 1511-12, Transferred from wood to canvas, is close to fact although he saw every aspect of nature as a manifestation of the Divine.

The experiments and new incursions into landscape painting during the Renaissance helped raise up the genre until in the nineteenth century it would finally come into it's own. Leonardo assisted this by stressing that the artist should work with his mind as much as his eye and get away from the idea of being a mere illustrator or copyist.

Anticipating future artists

Titian's landscapes of his native Cadore, Ruggero and Angelica in a Landscape, Pen and brown ink, with clumpy trees, rushing streams and vivid blue hills, are echoed in countless landscapes through the ages, especially in both Constable and Turners's work in England.

During the French Baroque Era, Claude Lorrain's, 1600–82, glowing paintings, had a transcendental feeling of the perfect and came from direct observations of nature whilst Nicolas Poussin (1648) had a strict geometry and he believed in a moral character in painting and wanted to control nature with intellectual creativity and many artists studied and tried to emulate these artists, including those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Spiritual Reaction

Mannerism was a reaction to the Renaissance, a way to depict Spirituality over Humanism. A form of Expressionism, it had a love of visual excitement akin to the Gothic tradition, everything was for effect. Tintoretto, Saint Mary of Egypt in Meditation, 1585, Oil on canvas and El Greco, the Greek, 1541-1614, View of Toledo, Oil on canvas, were great examples. Peter Paul Rubens', 1577-1640, landscapes were full of both naturalism and romantic escapism. The Hurricane, 1624, Oil on wood, is typical and his rainbows anticipated Turner.

The Northern naturalism

Sixteenth- century Flemish landscape began with Joachim Patinir and lasts over a hundred years and ends with the refined Jan Breughel the Elder, or Velvet or Flower Breughel, with sublime religious subjects, as in, Sodom and Gomorrah, Oil on copper. His father, Pieter Breghel the Elder, or Peasant Breughel (for his portrayals of that life) was considered the greatest of Flemish painters of the period with his combination of Italian maniera or style and Netherlands realism. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Oil on wood is believed to be, December or January, from a series of the Months.

Dutch painters soon moved towards a new naturalism unhampered by literary or classical allusions. This commitment to landscape for its own sake was novel in it's time. Light became the dominant theme and realism needed by a newly rich class. These were the honest tributes to this Northern landscape of flat fields and low skies. The new Dutch syle began with Hercules Seghjers of Haarlem, 1590-1638, with a kind of imaginative realism as in, Rocky Landscape, Oil on canvas, and a golden light that Rembrandt admired, owning several of his work. Names such as Esias van der Velde and Jan van Goyen developed such themes from around 1615 and Jacob von Ruisdael, with The Beach at Egmond-aan-Zee, Oil on canvas. de Konink, Cuyp and Meindert Hobbema, with, Avenue Middelharnis, 1689, Oil on canvas, also contributed to the naturalistic movement. Rembrandt added his own ideal paintings of sombre force, with his supreme genius, in a few oils, he rearranged nature drastically, vis a vis, The Stone Bridge, Oil on wood, Jan Vermeer's masterpiece, View of Delft is a well planned painting with an incredible subtle variety of tone.

The new French and English Schools

In France during the reign of Louis XIV, the argument as to which was more important, color or drawing came to a head. The partisans of drawing favored Poussin, whilst those of color, Rubens. This battle was won when, a product of the Rococo period, Antoine Watteau was accepted into the French Academy in 1717, with his Embarkation for Cythera. This painting has wistful lovers in a theatrical tableau and it began the career of the most famous French colorist and painter of lovers and musicians of the eighteenth century. This later led to the idylls of Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1732-1806, the last great painter of the eighteenth century, who along with Watteau, seemed to consider nature as well-tended parks and gardens and the latter contemplated the world with more than delight and painted it with freshness and freedom. The Shady Avenue, 1736-76, Oil on wood, a fine example.

Thomas Gainsborough, a portraitist, in England, belonged to a period in which his fellow countrymen tried to make actual 'places' into living versions of classical paintings. When these formal gardens were then used as starting points of landscape paintings, history had gone full circle, as in Landscape with a Bridge, after 1774, Oil on canvas.

In the nineteenth century, Romanticism, the opposite of classicism or neo-classicism began to take on a variety of meanings and introduced the idea of the sublime. This, was to bring forth the ideal of feeling, as to opposed to cold reason. This resulted in very dramatic works, later echoed in some of the Hudson Valley painters in America. James Ward, 1769-1859, painted Gorsdale Scar in Yorkshire, exaggerating an already spectacular piece of scenery. John Martin, in The Bard, before 1817, Oil on canvas, turns to literary and dark medieval legends, whose figures are dwarfed by fantastic mountain-scapes.

Joseph Mallard William Turner, 1775-1881, stated around 1810:

'To select, combine, that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art, is as much the business of the landscape painter, in his line, as in other departments of art.'

Turner typifies the best of the English landscape school in that he was brought up on the classical patterns which he mastered and then went on to develop his own completely personal style. One that we could call Romantic and poetic as he was often given to allegory. He dealt in 'essences' especially as a master of watercolor. Turner was probably the greatest landscape and seascape painter of all time and perhaps no other evolved over a greater visual span, than he. From the early masterworks such as the Fishermen at Sea, 1796, Oil on canvas, to the 1840s and the Falls of the Clyde, Oil on canvas, after an earlier, watercolor, there is a vast difference, that they hardly seem to be by the same hand. The dazzling color and high tonality of the late works seem to anticipate the Impressionists and in his final phase one can almost call this work, abstract. His profound continuity however, shows how single-mindedly he pursued his early goals and how brilliantly he finally attained them. He was the first to have his paintings hung low, as history paintings were, so that they could be viewed, as if entering them, rather than being hung, as if, altar pieces. Landscape was no longer to be seen from afar but had as an immediate experience. Watercolor was his great forte and is part of the English tradition of watercolor continued by John Sell Cotman, of Norfolk, 1782-1842, with his neatness and vigor.

Out of that East Anglia tradition came the great English landscapist, John Constable, 1776-1837, a naturalist and whilst Turner was being operatic he was being domestic. His country scenes are popular throughout the world. The Haywain was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824 and made an instant impact. His hard work, inspired by the Dutch, had him making quick impressions and oil sketches before working them up in detail in oils. Constable never went abroad, for his love of his native Suffolk; "those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful."

From this influence came Theodore Rousseau of the Barbizon School, named after a village near the forest of Fontainbleau, a group of radical, plein air painters. He treated trees with great reverence, attempting to reveal their psychology and was influenced by both Constable and the Dutch, resulting in works like, Pond with Oak Trees, 1865-69, Oil on canvas. He, with others, made an almost religious cult of nature. Leaving the unreality of urban life, they equated it with high moral values. Jean Francois Millet, 1814-75, saw the country as a work place, he glorified the hard life of the peasant, whose stock he too came from. Towards the end of his life he made purely landscape and his beautiful and dramatic, Spring, 1868-73, Oil on canvas, suggests the world of Symbolism. From this group, Camille Corot, a tonal, subtle colorist was very different, preferring his own compromise between classicism and natural observation, Cornfield in the Morvan, 1842, Oil on canvas. He was to have an influence later, on the Luminists in America, with his shimmering light through feathery willow trees. Gustave Courbet however, was more direct with brash color and form, as in Roe Deer in a Forest, 1866, Oil on canvas. His ideas were political, seeing art as art of the 'people.' as was Millet. As a group they anticipated the Impressionists by working outdoors without recourse to the studio, plein air.

The Romantic North

In Northern countries the Romantic view of nature varied enormously. Painters either were sternly realistic or tried to show off the characteristic beauties of their country. German artist, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840, was the exception and the greatest exponent of the Romantic landscape in northern Europe. Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, 1809, Oil on canvas, conveys a sense of mystery of the bewilderment of man confronted with the huge Creation. His conveyance of the romantic and the sublime also had great influence later in American painting as with the English, John Martin.

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists

From a small exhibition given by a few close friends working in the same way together, came the name for their genre. The freshness and immediacy of execution, shocked the public and the neglect of proper 'subjects' by Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Cezanne. Monet's Impression: Sunrise gave rise to the sarcastic comment, "an exhibition of impressionists."

When the Impressionists were at their best, they wove a pattern of light and shade over their canvases, eliminating hard outlines and graded shading. Their sheer use of pure color would have amazed their predecessors. Black and brown were removed for color absorbed them. Claude Monet 1840-1926, profited from working with Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1841-1919, who'd been a painter of china. As plein air artists they'd finish canvases in their studios, with Monet's on a house boat at one point. Friends and others; Camille Pissaro, L'Hermitage, Pontoise, 1873, Oil on canvas, Pierre August Renoir, 1874, Oil on canvas, Alfred Sisley, Flood at Le Port-Marly 1876, Oil on canvas, and Edouard Manet, The Swallows, (The Artist's Wife and Mother) 1873, Oil on canvas, are remembered for their work in this genre and all influenced each other. Monet really stands out as the leader and innovator. His late work, enormous canvases of Waterlilies that were a part of his beloved gardens, would be a foretaste of Modern abstractionists to come. "Monet is only an eye but what an eye!" declared Cezanne.

The Japanese influence

Japanese woodcut prints (in the ukiyo-e or the Floating World genre) were very popular at this time. Monet owned many and they influenced many artists and especially, Van Gogh, Gaughin, Manet and Degas, all who included references to them in their paintings. A master whose work showed them a new way to organize their subjects in space, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) made a print, Fuji which was a design of calligraphic brilliance and demonstrated a fleeting moment captured in an eternal pattern.

Impressionism's influence

Other nations were influenced by this style including America, especially Childe Hassam. An American living in London, James Abott McNeill Whistler had a lot of success with his beautiful Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, 1870-02, Oil on canvas. In France, Homer Dodge Martin, 1836-97, the oldest American Impressionist, a Hudson River artist, went to Paris at age of forty and Theodore Robinson was an ardent supporter of Monet and stayed with him in Giverny. Mary Cassatt, born in Pittsburg but educated in France, lived there and painted many fine mother and child portraits. A friend of Degas she is considered more of a post-impressionist and painted but a few landscapes. In Italy, sculptor and painter, Adriano Cecioni said, "From the point of view of art, everything is beautiful." After the unification of Italy, the new realistic painters became, in 1861, the macchialli from their macchie or patches of color.

Between, 1880 and 1886, Impressionism declined, as some were seeking a scientific solution to the problem of light, which the older painters had worked out through feeling rather than reason. Laboratory analysis of the spectrum gave rise to a new technique, known as pointillism in France and divisionismo in Italy. George Seurat showed Sunday afternoon at the the Island of La Grande Jette, in 1886, Oil on canvas, with vibrant light distilled all over, at the final Impressionism exhibition. Paul Signac, 1863-1935, was Seurat's devoted disciple but more lyrical and less restricted. Cote d'Azure, 1889, Oil on canvas is an example.

Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cezanne began to explore the landscape in even different ways. His geometric, almost cubist, views of his beloved Provence, The Rocky Landscape at Aix and Lake Annecy, 1895, Oil on canvas, where the line is never static. He wished to catch the fleeting moment, as did his peers but now to objectify it, make it as solid as the art in museums. 'Where to put the line? the light moves, I move, everything is movement,' he declared. This was serious work, not the lighthearted world of the Impressionists.

Symbolism

Symbolism came as a reaction to naturalism and Impressionism, trying to make a synthesis between nature and the artist,s personal idea. The Pont-Aven school, in Brittany, used this idea in landscape and revolved around Paul Gaughin, 1848-1903. Using the techniques of Emile Bernard; large flat areas of color often with dark outlines, not unlike stained glass, as in Les Alyscamps, 1888, Oil on canvas, After a spell living with Van Gogh in Provence, Gaughin journeyed to Panama and finally ended his days in Tahiti. "Dream in the presence of nature," he told others and he painted idyllic native scenes such as The Day of God (Mahana Atua) somewhat recalling Egyptian friezes, in their flatness. In Provence, his colleague, the Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, an artist of religious fervor, whose undiagnosed and severe illness drove him to tormented landscapes of brilliant color and whirling lines as in; Cypresses, 1889, Oil on canvas and unforgettable Sunflowers until finally suicide ended his young life. Supported by a brother, an art dealer, he was to only sell one painting through all his years of toil. However, his letters explaining his thoughts on painting are well read, today, whilst his paintings command high prices. In Paris, 'La Douanier,' the customs officer, self-taught, Henri Rousseau, charmed all with his simple but completely imaginary, exotic excursions, as in The Merry Pranksters, 1906, Oil on canvas. Sometimes known as a naif he was a great and original painter in his own right.

Freedom in the Twentieth Century

Freed from many old constraints, artists began to experiment more and more, with happy results; Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, a brilliant colorist with, The Blue Room, The Bluff, 1907, Oil on canvas and a leading spirit of the the Fauves "wild beasts," with vivid and highly decorative motifs, Raoul Dufy with sketchy frivolity and decorative color, Maurice Utrillo and his beloved winter Paris-scapes, Vlaminck (1876-1958) laying on thick layers of oil with a knife, etc.

After generations of painters had solved all the problems of realism, illusions of reality, space and light having been conquered, painters had the choice of starting from scratch as did the Cubists or making the essences of landscape by abstraction, etc. Cubism was a continuation of Cezannes' explorations, breaking down the landscape into geometric forms, as created in France, by Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908, Oil on canvas and Pablo Picasso, in Spain and France, Factory at Horta de Ebra, 1909, Oil on canvas. In Italy, Futurism was on the rise, led by Giacomo Balla, with its synthesized color and movement. Paul Klee, a Swiss, Terraced Garden, 1920, Oil on cardboard, explored an organic and whimsical world, whilst Klimt, in Austria, Chateau Above the Lake1908 and Marc Chagall, in The Repose of the Poet captured landscapes in fantasy and realism combined. Then came the mental masters, the Surrealists striving to take the landscape further with the imagination than ever. Salvador Dali in Spain and France with Atavistic Images After the Rain, 1934, Oil on canvas, with an incredible technical facility and inventiveness to match. Rene Magritte in Belgium, The Castle of the Pyrenees, 1959, Oil on canvas, whose realistic subjects are juxtaposed in strange but not unpleasant directions, are two of the moderns who won our hearts and minds.

Moderns at the beginning of this century who helped free our concepts are; the Russian, Vasily Kandinsky, of the Blaue Reiter group with The Blue Rider, 1903, Oil on canvas and Impression V (The Park)1911, Oil on canvas, the first of the abstractionists, Piet Mondrian, Dutch, The Tree 1912, Oil on canvas, Umberto Boccioni, Italy, Morning 1909, Oil on canvas. Later came; Franz Marc Roe Deer in the Wood, 1913-14, Oil on canvas, Oscar Kokoschka, Austria, Tre Croci Pass in the Dolomites, 1913, Oil on canvas, Giorgio Morandi, Italy, Landscape 1925, Oil on canvas, Max Ernst, Germany, Europe After the Rain 1940-42, Oil on canvas, Graham Sutherland, England, Welsh Landscape 1973, Oil on canvas, Jean Dubuffet, Ice Landscape (Opal) 1954, Oil on canvas, etc.

The tumultuous Twentieth Century ended with a multitude of artists going in endless directions. However, Europe had given America it's inspiration and New York soon became the center of the Art World, leaving Paris far behind. The European tradition, however, lives on, with the artists and paintings of the new paradise. The popular Bernard Buffet, France, 1928-1999, with his black outlines, reminiscent of Georges Rouault, a religious painter, 1871-1958, and stained glass, kept the vision of his beloved capital alive, telling us, Painting, we do not talk about it, we do not analyze it, we feel it.

The American landscape

In The Beginning, All the World was America - John Locke

In the woods, is perpetual Youth. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. - Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature

Young America

In America the young nation began with it's influences chiefly from England and the European tradition. gradually, over time as if molded by the landscape itself, uniquely American genres and styles were born with more than an occasional nod back over the ocean.

The thoroughly American branch of painting, based upon the facts and tastes of the country and people is .....landscape James Jackson Jarves in his book The Art-idea, 1864.

In 1816 De Witt Clinton soon to be Governor of the State New York, declared, "Can there be a country in the world better calculated, than ours, to exalt the imagination........?"

Images of the landscape and ideas of the nation were deeply intertwined. These played an important role in shaping American identity in the nineteenth century. Indeed the vast panoramas from east to west cried out for painters and slowly they made their way into this new paradise.

The Hudson Valley Painters

Many of the landscapes produced in the eighteenth century were strictly topographical; views of towns or beauty spots and were often made by military men. In the early decades of the nineteenth, landscape began to be created as pure and ideal. Thomas Doughty, 1793-1852, from Philadelphia began with picturesque composition, whilst History painter Washington Allston, Diana On a Chase 1805, trained in London, with his allegorical scenes rooted in the Italian tradition and naturalized by the English, gave stimuli to Thomas Cole's ambitious program to create a uniquely American landscape art. It was to find examples of the sublime and picturesque; that were featured in the writings of Washington Irving, set in the Catskills, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, 1890-20, and James Fennimore Cooper's 'Leather Stocking' novels such as The Last Of the Mohicans (1826) that started Thomas Cole and other artists after him, to make their way to the Catskill mountains, in the Hudson Valley, only a short distance up the Hudson River from New York City. Kindred Spirits 1849, Oil on canvas, by Asher Brown Durand depicts the poet (Willim Cullen Bryant) and painter admiring the Catskill scenic panorama. These are men 'who in the love of Nature holds/Communion with her visible forms' Thanatopis.

The English John Martin's outsize works, (1851-53) three apocalyptic visions in vast landscapes seen in Romantic mezzotints, were to influence both Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand

Thomas Cole, born in England, moved with his family to Ohio but he returned to the East Coast to work as a landscape painter, inspired by Allston, to include poetic themes. He articulated his ideas both in words as in paint. In 1829 he returned to Europe and England where he saw Turner's work. He was interested in his ideas of the Sublime (drama in nature) in the language of the landscape. His early works have an air of improvisation, violent dramas of chiaroscuro, although his need to make known the beauties of the American scenery made everything he did seem fresh and new, as in Mountain Sunrise, Catskill 1826, Oil on panel. From 1833-1836 he worked on The Course of Empire a series of modest paintings, for a New York patron, as an allegory on the progress of civilization. These held a wide range of technical experiment and a potted history of different landscape styles. A close contemporary, Jasper Francis Cropsey, 1823-1900, was to adopt Cole's methods and make them his own. Autumn on the Hudson River 1860, Oil on canvas, was to be the central masterpiece of what was to be loosely termed as The Hudson River School in the 1870s. This, coined by a critic on the New York Tribune and included Church, Kensett, Gifford and Durand.

Frederick Edwin Church came from a wealthy family in Connecticut, joined Cole in his Catskill studio in 1844, staying with him for two years and his early work echoed his master. After Cole's death, Church changed his style dramatically and produced work that simplified the view and created a poetry from just a few simple elements as in, Clouds at Sunrise, 1849. John Frederick Kensett painted with much cooler color, Reminiscence of the White Mountains 1852, Oil on canvas, was a contrast to the warmth of the previous artists' subjects. His serenity and lack of busy brushwork was later to be given a name, Luminism in the 1950's by an art-historian and was applied equally to such artists as Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904 and Fitz Hugh Lane, 1804-1865, a great painter of ships as in Becalmed off Halfway Rock, 1860, Oil on canvas. They were not a group and didn't work together. Sanford Robinson Gifford was a master of a radiant and diffused sunlight in, The Wilderness, 1860, Oil on canvas and Heade created dramatic scenes as in, Thunderstorm At the Shore, 1870-1, Oil on paper, on canvas mounted on wood panel.

George Innes, the same age as Church, belonged to both the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists and travelled widely. In 1840 he came to know the Barbizon School in France and admired Corot's work, plein-air. He followed this practice of making sketches on site and then finishing the painting in the studio, allowing his imagination free rein which gave his scenes a silent dusky look as in Sunset at Montclair, 1894, Oil on panel.

Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake George Innes

Another member of the Society, Albert Pinkham Ryder, was to invert the landscape further, a painter of the mysteries and moods of the night and the sea, creating works of inner expression. Moonlit Cove (1880-90) Oil on canvas. Typically it is a work described as Expressionist.

Frederick Edwin Church's purpose was in showing the public the paradise of the New World. To this end he evoked Claude in composition but made enormous canvases that were put on show at eye level for people to experience this and for which he charged admission. A leaf from Turner's book. As an explorer he journeyed to South America for exotic views, as in the Andes of Ecuador 1855. He also built Olana an amber windowed castle of a house, overlooking the Hudson River, opposite the Catskills, decorated with ceramic tiles from Turkey in a blend of Gothic, Persian and Aesthetic Movement elements, it stands today, a symbolic shrine to the spiritual and poetic artists in the nineteenth century. Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860 Oil on canvas, symbolized the mood of America, at that time, an emblem of Transcendentalism. In his repertoire of unique but spectacular panoramas were, Niagara Falls from the American Side, 1867 Icebergs and the Aurora Borealis, all Oils on canvas.

Coming of Age

Church's greatest rival was Albert Bierstadt, with his sensational paintings of the American West. Born In Germany in 1830 and with his family, moved to America at age two and later returned to Dusseldorf to study painting. On return in 1859, he went on an expedition the explore the Rocky Mountains. The great picture that he made on his return was The Rocky Mountain, Lander's Peak, 1863, Oil on linen. His style was cool, objective and very detailed and had already been proved by a Swiss painting of Lake Lucerne. His technique was to make pencil sketches and small oil studies. His brothers ran a photographic studio and he also used a camera. His work was known as new Ideal landscape as in Among the Sierra Mountains, California shown in London in 1868, 'not fiction but portraiture', was the reaction. Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868, Oil on canvas, was described by the artist as the Garden of Eden, 'the most magnificent place I was in,' recalling Cole's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1827-8, Oil on canvas. As a result of paintings from this area, in 1864, during the Civil War, landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (creator of Central Park, in New York City) drafted a bill for the preservation of Yosemite Valley, for the nation which President Abraham Lincoln signed into law.

Thomas Moran, 1837-1926 born in England as Cole, grew up in Philadelphia and in 1860 traveled to Lake Superior. From this trip he gathered material for his Hiawatha pictures. After producing a series of bright watercolors of Yellowstone's geysers and springs, a law was passed protecting that land from development and his painting Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and The Chasm of the Colorado (1892) Oil on canvas. Both massive paintings were purchased by the Congress. This marked the end of the panoramic tradition of the American Sublime.

A New Century, New Ideas.

Winslow Homer another great painter began as an illustrator in Boston and served as an artist during the Civil War, he was famous foe wood engravings and soon his oils and watercolors became as popular. He travelled extensively and saw Japanese prints in France and took the best ideas of the west and the east and made them his own. He described the physical phenomena of the sea with spontaneity in both watercolor and oil. His West Point, Prout's Neck, 1900, Oil on canvas, combined these elements of style, a new vision for a new century.

Turn of the century trailblazers

From the 1890s through the 1910s, American Impressionism flourished in art colonies—loosely affiliated groups of artists who lived and worked together and shared a common aesthetic vision. Art colonies tended to form in small towns that provided affordable living, abundant scenery for painting, and relatively easy access to large cities where artists could sell their work. Some of the most important American Impressionist artists gathered at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, both on Long Island Sound; New Hope, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River; and Brown County, Indiana. American impressionist artists also thrived in California at Carmel and Laguna Beach; in New York on eastern Long Island at Shinnecock, largely due to the influence of William Merritt Chase; and in Boston where Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson became important practitioners of the impressionist style.

Ten American Painters or The American Ten or The Ten - A group of American painters from New York and Boston who exhibited together from 1898-1919. They had been members of the Society of American Artists, but resigned from this organization upon deciding that its exhibitions were too too large and conservative. Most of the Ten had studied in Paris in the 1880s and were greatly influenced by French Impressionism. The Ten were were: Thomas E. Dewing (1851-1938), Edward E. Simmons (1852-1931), Julien Alden Weir (1852-1919), John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), Joseph R. De Camp (1858-1923), Willard L. Metcalf (1858-1925), Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Frank Benson (1862-1951), Robert Reid (1862-1929), and Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938); with William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916) taking the place of Twachtman upon his death.

Ohio-born Charles Burchfield was one of the great artistic visionaries of the twentieth century. Inspired by Leon Bakts' designs for ballet and Chinese scroll painting and after moving from Ohio to Buffalo, New York, from 1915-21 he produced a unique body of work. In 1963 he stated, "An artist must paint, not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols......" Decorative Landscape, Hot Morning Sunlight (Posts' Woods) Water Color on Paper, started in pencil and colored later. His, is the first great painting of our heartland. With a career that spanned half a century, he never became abstract and regarded painting as a moral and spiritual act.These unusual paintings of nature, seem to be giving off vibrations from the trees, flowers and plants.

Edward Hopper stayed away from abstraction too and as a student in 1900 at the New York School of Art, traveled to Europe and later worked as a commercial artist in the City. He first showed with etchings and later oils. The Camel's Hump (1931) Oil on canvas, exemplified his idea that, "My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate expressions of nature." Hopper is the starting point for the later, Realists.

Maxfield Parrish as an illustrator was in great demand and his landscapes looked magical, idealistic and theatrical and many were invented from models. However, he really wanted to concentrate on painting landscapes and at age sixty four began a series of paintings for Brown and Bigelow, greeting card publishers. In 1934 he painted Elm, Late Afternoon paving the way for a relationship which lasted for thirty years, through ill health and arthritis and he stopped at ninety one, passing away in 1966, a career of, seventy five years. His Daybreak first reproduced in 1923, remains one of the most beloved images of all time and made him a princely sum for his day.

The first Moderns

Marsden Hartley was one of the first great modern painters, although an itinerant, constantly struggling with his personal life and finances and unable to settle, he alternated between Nova Scotia, Maine, New England and New York. His paintings of The Last Stone Walls, Dogtown (Gloucester, Mass.) 1936-7, oil on canvas, reminiscent of Pynkham Ryder, point the way to future modernism.

Charles Sheeler, born 1883, studied with William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as did other great painters of the period. He later worked as an architectural photographer to supplement his painting and used photographs as source material for paintings and drawings throughout his career. In 1937 he wrote, "Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward." View of Central Park 1932 Conte crayon, based on a photograph and took on the quality of a photo, a taste of what would become Photo-Realism thirty years later.

American Regionalism, the Mid-West

Grant Wood's Fall Plowing 1931 Oil on canvas, at a time of great financial depression shows an ideal mid-western agrarianism. grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry are considered the trinity of Regionalism, an anti-dote to modern art. Wood had studied Flemish art and was highly stylized but Alexandre Hogue made stronger comments on the abuse and exploitation of the land with his The Crucified Land 1939 Oil on canvas, and paintings of the Dust Bowl.

Georgia O'Keefe who'd made her mark in New York City with her enlarged and close-up flower paintings moved to New Mexico permanently, after her husband, photographer, Alfred Stieglitz's death in 1946. Moving between abstraction and realism she portrayed the Southwest and the desert with sensuality and ambiguity as in Black Place 11 Oil on canvas.

Cape Cod

Milton Avery, with the intensity of O'Keefe and mainly self-taught he painted almost abstract, sweet natured views of the New England coast. His reductive style, from small sketches to water colors to oils, led to free and lyrical poems of nature, vis a vis, Tangerine Moon and Wine Dark Sea, 1959, Oil on canvas. His work led to the pure abstract fields of color painted by his friend, Mark Rothko.

Edwin Dickinson, Rock Edge Palisades 1953 Oil on canvas, was another artist whose tone poems seem to belong both to the 1980s and to the 1880s both. He was a master of tonality and delicate chromatic shifts, who'd studied as had O'Keefe, with William Merritt Chase but belonged to no one group and produced some of the most dream-like images of the twentieth century.

Towards Realism and a new Realism

Andrew Wyeth for all the argument about his work is indeed a painter of significance and realism. Whilst the son of the great illustrator NC Wyeth and in the tradition of Howard Pyle and Albrecht Durer, he is a superb draftsman and master craftsman. At first his work was thought of as photographic but with the advent of Photo Realism (in the 1970s) it was realized just how interpretive he was. Ring Road 1985, Tempera, shows an almost Oriental feeling and abstraction. However, his work is always painterly and tactile.

In the mid-nineteen fifties and sixties came a shift from abstract to figurative painting on both the East and West coasts. In California, the influences included Matisse; Richard Diebenkorn, View From a Porch Oil on canvas, 1959, Wayne Thiebaud, Coloma Ridge, 1967-68, Acrylic and Pastel on canvas David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Landscape Afternoon 1959 Oil on canvas, Paul Wonner, James Weeks and Theophilus Brown, West Coast realists from the fifties, in the late sixties, became known as the Bay Area figurative painters. In the East, the Abstract Expressionists had held sway but that began to change too. Faifield Porter's beautiful Island Farmhouse, 1969 Oil on canvas, he claimed, was a 'reformed Realism.' Others artists, included, Phillip Pearlstein, who later became a painter of realistic nudes and his Monument Valley a 1976 Watercolor. Gabriel Laderman, came to realism from abstraction and is known for his intellectual, cool style, as is his West Dover, 1968, Oil on canvas. Neil Welliver is a widely known painter and is known for his large paintings of the wilds of northern Maine, as in, Late Squall 1984, oil on canvas. Alex Katz well known for his slick portraits has produced a large number of landscapes, since the fifties, often using collage. Full Moon, 1987, Oil on canvas, being an exception.

Painterly Realism, Romantics and Expressionists.

Artists such as James Weeks, Berkshire Landscape 1972-3 Acrylic on canvas, developed from Abstract Expressionism and were known as 'painterly.' The Bay Area artists never lost their painterly traits since the fifties. Others include; Jane Freilicher Thicket and Field 1984 Oil on canvas, Paul Reiska, Horseleech Pond, Indian Red Sky, 1984, Oil on canvas, Vincent Arcilesi, Grand Canyon, 1975, Oil on canvas, George Nick Over Pemigewasset River 1986 Oil on canvas, Richard Crozier Owlshead from Mount Battie 1986, Oil on canvas, and the plein-air premier-coup paintings of Nebraska by Keith Jacobshagen, such as, N.W. 84th St. & Agnew Rd 1983 Oil on paper. Others include, from the eighties, Don Nice, Sheila Gardner, Susan Shatter, John Gordon, and William Nichols,

Representing those painters that render the precise image are, Rackstraw Downes with his, Dragon Cement Plant, Maine, 1986, Oil on canvas and Richard Estes who works from photos but without mechanical aids and is known as a Photo-Realist, with Central Park 1987 Oil on canvas. William Beckman, Marjorie Portnow, Altoon Sultan, Ben Burns and many others in the eighties worked in this strict realistic style, working from photographs or no.

The Romantics however were more instinctive in approach, as in Jack Beale's Dark Pool 1980, Pastel on paper. Russell Chatham, Winter Evening 1980, Oil on canvas and Robert Jordan The Trail to Champney Falls, 1981, oil on canvas are also atmospheric as are; Richard Chiriani, David Ligare, Bonnie Sklarski, who with Juan Gonzalez add allegory to the mix. Not to forget Paul Wonner's Twenty-seven Studies for Romantic Views of San Francisco 1980 Acrylic on paper.

Bernard Chanet, Changing 1986 Oil on canvas, is one of those that has carried forward the great Expressionist art of the past, Alfred Leslie with, Approaching the Grand Canyon 1977-81, A series of five watercolors from 100 Views Along the Road reveal the spirit of the landscape whilst Wolf Kahn Barn Atop a Ridge 1987 Oil on canvas, has stated that he wanted to "do Rothko over again from nature," and his oils and pastels, shimmer in fields of color. Neil Blaine, Gloucester Harbor from Banner Hill, 1986, oil and many more work in these highly expressive styles.

The rebirth of impressionism in America: The 1950s and beyond.

In the 1950s, a quarter of a century after the death of Monet, major museums in America started having exhibitions of the original French Impressionists paintings, and in so doing Impressionism was reborn. The resurgence of interest in Impressionism continues to this day, and is especially evident in the continued popularity of plein-air painting.

Tradition continues.

In the Hudson Valley region today are many painters continuing the tradition of those pioneers of the past. Amongst them are two artists who have taught at the State University of New York at New Paltz, in the Fine Arts program. This college sits in view of the beautiful Shawgunk Mountain ridge, with it's famous Mountain House and a favorite of international climbers, at the beginning of the Catskill mountain chain. These views inspire Alex Martin, with his studies in oil and watercolors and other media, of the effects that light and local skies have on the scenes in the valleys and on the mountains. His paintings are full of the colors and hues of earlier Impressionists and Abstract Impressionists. Another former lecturer, George Wexler, who had real experience as a New York City, Abstract Impressionist, travels further afield to find his subject matter. Finding accessible views all over the Hudson River Valley area, he now paints in oils, in a much more realistic, almost photo-realistic, manner. He would be the first to admit as he has done, 'that it's impossible to paint every leaf, so that realism is really a mis-nomer.'

In the new Century, painters continue to reveal the American landscape, rural and urban in every style and medium available in this great time of technical innovation. There are still those who stay with the true and tried method of plein-air and or working from sketches, water colors, pastels etc., back in the studio. One such California artist is, Dory Grady, who at 70 years of age continues to work from nature in this ageless method. She also teaches on a regular basis and is currently writing an auto biography. A long time resident of Eagle Rock, she is mentioned in the same breath as other celebrities who've made their home there. Quoted from her web-site: Extremely versatile, she is equally comfortable with drawing, oil, watercolor, acrylic, silkscreen, etching or lithographic printmaking. Her work is defined, not by a style, but rather by continual experimentation, growth and change. The only constant is her focus on the natural world. Says Dory,

My 30 years of art shows in Boddy House Gallery is my contribution to renewal of the Human Spirit, surrounded by nature.

Art is not created, it is achieved. It is the product of talent and relentless practice, tempered by years of training.

But even then, you give more. You give your soul.

Dory can be found at http://www.gallerygrade.com/

The Inner Landscape

Other artists who work with an abstract or surrealistic style to explore the inner landscapes of ourselves and our imagination, include; Jan Parker in Hawaii and Benny Andersson in New Jersey.

Benny Andersson paints "visual prayers, intended to promote deep reflection and healing within the viewer and to have a spiritual and uplifting effect on the soul, to keep dreams alive." He likes to see artists as "messengers of truth and beauty." His landscapes, full of unique imagery, cosmic and earthly visions, recall Hieronymus Bosch and are endowed with transparent colors as clear as glass. Unlike Bosch, He shows us worlds free from danger, impurity and abuse and allows us to see nature as through the eyes of the newborn child. Hailing from Sweden originally, he has lived and worked in the USA for thirty years, exhibiting in both lands, including Japan. His titles give clues to their content as in Rites of Eternal Harmony Acrylic on canvas and The Great Beyond, Acrylic on canvas. In Cheongpyeong, South Korea, he was commissioned to create two large paintings for a newly built palace there. The subjects were; God's Ideal in the Spirit World and God's Ideal World on Earth 2005-06. Benny can be found at,

http:www.manhattanarts.com/Gallery/BennyAndersson.htm www.artmarketing.com/gallery/andersson

Jan Parker is an English artist also working in the US for thirty years and now resident in Hawaii, Currently he is painting in a purely abstract style reminiscent of the Abstract Impressionists, such as Mark Rothko. He does this with a concentration on light and color brightly interacting together and has had great success in Japan with his new series trilogy. Following a serious illness he said, "the overwhelming existence that saved my life is indescribable in words, it could only be described in painting." Since marrying, his Japanese wife, Sawako, who previously had bought one of his paintings following a deep experience from it, he found the support he needed to make this new leap of faith into a new experience of painting. His impasto style is as his feeling, that 'painting ought to look like it has been painted' and convey the sense of the vibrations transmitted by the Divine. He has said; "To me God is the greatest artist of all." A red field of fire and passion with a high horizon of pinks and yellow and a sliver of blue, entitled God is King Of Kings Acrylic on canvas, 2005, is the cover of the catalog on the Portrait of God series. Whilst the cover of the Color of God series dances across the book in vibrant waves of many colors and hues, from Color of God No 14, Oil, 2006. These paintings have been inspired by the essence of true love that I have experienced in nature, he writes. The Heart of God will be seen in Spring, 2008.

Canadian landscape

As explorers, naturalists, mariners, merchants and settlers arrived on the shores of Atlantic Canada in the early centuries of its exploration, they were confronted by what they saw as a hostile and dangerous environment and an unforgiving sea. These Europeans tried to cope with the daunting new land by mapping, recording and claiming it as their own. Their understanding of the specific nature of this land and its inhabitants varied greatly, with observations ranging from highly accurate and scientific to outlandish or fantastic. These observations are documented in the landscape works they produced. In more recent times some of the best examples of Canadian landscape art can be found in the works of the Group of Seven.and the British Columbia forest-scapes of Emily Carr. The indigenous peoples of Canada, the Eskimo and Indian created their own art work which often were examples of hunting and fishing, the ocean waters and other natural elements usually taking a backseat to the action.

The Importance of Landscape painting

In the need to represent nature comes the need to show it. We all wish to share that which we love and landscapes are no exception. When gazing on a Chinese panorama in some long dim past dynasty, surely we share and relive the emotions felt by that artist. This way is the way not only of feeling but of intelligence for we now begin to learn of our history far and wide. The artist becomes a recorder of feelings and fact, delving into the mysteries of how things are and come to be.

Landscape painting not only gives us view into this material universe in an image frozen in time and space, but takes us back to that very moment of it's conception. Not only history but philosophy and even religion may be embedded with the artists' individual stamp, thoughts and ideas. Science too is present, in an examination of the scene, it's light, form and color skillfully rendered by the painter, akin to the botanical illustrator. Most of all we feel the emotion of one standing in awe, striving to bring that moment to life, reborn in another form, the painting, a work of art.

For many, the tranquil depictions of nature give respite and relaxation, calming of the soul and spirit in one's own home. Yet, more than a sense of wonder is felt in the public and private galleries of art. Moreover, we now experience in this modern life, more and more, not only the visions of this physical creation but also the abstract, exploration and landscapes of our inner worlds, as noted by current artist Jan Parker.

The great romantic, Lafcadio Hearn wrote from Japan, a century ago:

....As the scene, too swiftly receding diminishes,....I vainly wish I could buy this last vision of it,,,,,and delight my soul betime with gazing thereon.

Related -scapes

• Vedute is the Italian term for view, and generally used for the painted landscape, often cityscapes which were a common 18th century painting thematic.
• Skyscapes or Cloudscapes are depictions of clouds, weatherforms, and atmospheric conditions.
• Moonscapes show the landscape of a moon.
• Seascapes depict oceans or beaches.
• Riverscapes depict rivers or creeks.
• Cityscapes or townscapes depict cities (urban landscapes).
• Hardscapes are paved over areas like streets and sidewalks, large business complexes and housing developments, and industrial areas.
• Aerial landscapes depict a surface or ground from above, especially as seen from an airplane or spacecraft. (When the viewpoint is directly overhead, looking down, there is of course no depiction of a horizon or sky.) This genre can be combined with others, as in the aerial cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, the aerial moonscapes of Nancy Graves, or the aerial cityscapes of Yvonne Jacquette.
• Inscapes are landscape-like (usually surrealist or abstract) artworks which seek to convey the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space. [For sources on this statement, see the Inscape (visual art) article.]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Arthur, John. Spirit of Place, Contemporary Landscape Painting & The American tradition 1989. Bullfinch Press ISBN 0-821-21707-0
• Bazarov, Konstantin, Landscape painting,1981. London: Octopus Books; NY: Mayflower Books, OCLC 8686498
• Brigante, Guiliano, The View Painters of Europe, Phaidon Press Ltd., 1979. ISBN 0-714-81407-5
• Carli, Enzo. The Landscape In Art, from 3,000 B.C.E. to Today 1979 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano English translation copyright Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A.,Milano ISBN 0-688-03678-3
• Clark, Sir Kenneth, Landscape into Art, Slade Lectures,1949. Harper and Row, ISBN 0-060-10781-2
• Dreikausen, Margret, "Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art"1985 (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London,; Mississauga, Ontario:) ISBN 0-879-82040-3

• Jeffares, Bo Landscape Painting 1979. Mayflower Books Inc. NYC ISBN 0-831-75413-3
• Kiers, Judikje; Fieke, Tissink, The Golden Age of Dutch Art, Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2000.

ISBN 0-500-23774-3

• Leonard, Elizabeth Painting the Landscape 1984. Watson-Guptill Publications, ISBN 0-8230-3655-3
• McShine, Kynaston. Editor. The Natural Paradise, Painting in America 1800-1950 1976. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.. ISBN 0-870-70505-9.
• Novak, Barbara, Nature and culture: American landscape and painting, 1825-1875,1980. NY: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-195-02606-3
• Shanes, Eric, Turner The Masterwoks Portland House, 1990. ISBN 0-517-01509-9
• Wilton, Andrew; T J Barringer; Tate Britain (Gallery); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.; Minneapolis Institute of Arts. American sublime : landscape painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-691-09670-8
• Wong, Wucius, The Tao of Chinese Painting, Principles & Methods, Hong Kong, Everbest Printing Co. Ltd.; NY: Design Press, 1991. ISBN 0-830-69010-7
• Wilton Andrew & Tim Barringer 2002 American Sublime, Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880Princeton University Press ISBN 0-691-09670-8
• Winchester, Simon, 2003, Krakatoa, The Day the World Exploded, 27 August 1883: the Penguin Group, ISBN 0-670-91126-7

External links

• Virtual Vault, an online exhibition of Canadian historical art at Library and Archives Canada Retrieved October 7, 2007.
• http://images.artelino.com/images/images/japanese-painting2.jpg Retrieved October 7, 2007.
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_062.jpg Retrieved October 7, 2007.
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Turner%2C_J._M._W._-_The_Fighting_T%C3%A9m%C3%A9raire_tugged_to_her_last_Berth_to_be_broken.jpg Retrieved October 7, 2007.

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