Landscape painting

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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 description. In Europe the ever shifting seasons and subtleties of changing suffused light, created a different style of painting, championed by artists such as the Imprseeionists and WJM Turner. 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 the 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 very as very low on the scale of subject matter, second only to the fruit and flowers varieties.

The oldest recorded views in the west were cut into rock at Valcamonica, near Lake Guarda, Italy, some 2000 years B.C.E. These are geometric and not regarded, strictly as art. However, 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.

Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, c. 600.
File:The Harvesters by Brueghel.jpg
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.
File:Jane Frank Dorado No2.jpg
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.

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.

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,[1] and Sir Kenneth Clark brought to view, in a series of lectures to the Slade School of Art, London, 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"[2] 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. Almost every Englishman when asked what he thought was meant by the word 'beauty' would begin to describe a landscape.

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, oil and water-colorist, 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

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 Countries showing nature in miniature perfection and this style inspired the Italians.

In the North Gothic painters such as Jan van Eyck could give their landscapes luminosity whilst others, a sharp exactitude, a hard crisp style, such as Robert Campin, 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. Breugel the Elder depicted the change in seasons as experienced by the peasants (The Village) and created allegory as in The Fall of Icarus. as well as depictions of country life Haymaking and Hunters in the Snow. He combined Italian style along with Netherlands realism. Flemish does not always mean naturalistic. When we witness the works of Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights we see a world purely of the imagination, both heavenly and hellish.

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 the 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. Of course 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. Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks.

Piero della Francesca with his simple control of form and beautifully balanced picture of the world was able to combine both Flemish and Florentine styles. Mantegna 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.

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.

Titian's landscapes of his native Cadore, with clumpy trees, rushing streams and vivid blue hills, are echoed in countless landscapes through the ages, even in both Constable and Turners's work in England.

Claude Lorraine's 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. It had a love of visual excitement akin to the Gothic tradition, everything was for effect. Rubens, Tintoretto and El Greco (1541-1614) View of Toledo were great examples. Rubens (1577-184) landscapes were full of both naturalism and romantic escapism. His rainbows anticipated Turner.

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. Names such as Esias van der Velde and Jan van Goyen developed such themes from around 1615 and Jacob von Ruisdael, de Konink, Cuyp and Hobbema contributed to the naturalistic movement. Rembrandt added his own ideal paintings of sombre force. Jan Vermeer's View of Delft is a well planned painting with an incredible subtle variety of tone.

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 led to the idylls of Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) who along with Watteau seemed to consider nature as well-tended parks and gardens and the later contemplated the world with more than delight and painted it with freshness and freedom.

The new English and French Schools

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.

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) to the 1840s and the Falls of the Clyde 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 they were altar pieces. Landscape was no longer to be seen from afar but had as an immediate experience.

Another great English landscapist, John Constable (1776-1837) was a naturalist, 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. From this influence came Theodore Rousseau of the Barbizon School, a group of plein air painters.

From this group, Camille Corot, a tonal, subtle colorist was very different, preferring his own compromise between classicism and natural observation, with shimmering light through feathery willow trees. He was to have an influence later, on the Luminists in America. Gustave Courbet however, was more direct with brash color and form. His ideas were political, seeing art as art of the 'people.' as was Millet, with his views of the common peasant. As a group they anticipated the Impressionists by working outdoors without recourse to the studio, plein air.

The Impressionists and Post-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. There was a renewed interest in color symbolism which George Seurat carried to scientific extreme. Whilst Pissaro, Renoir, Alfred Sisley (1839-99)and Edouard Manet(1832-83)are remembered for their work in this genre and all influenced others, 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 abstractions to come.

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 where the line is never static, "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, hungry as they may have been. Next came Van Gogh and Paul Gaughin, the one a tormented soul whose undiagnosed but severe illness drove him to tormented landscapes of brilliant color and unforgettable Sunflowers and finally suicide, whilst Gauguin journeyed as far as Tahiti to furnish us with his vision of flat planes and unique color, The Day of God (Mahana no Atua). In France,'La Douanier' Rousseau charmed all with his simple but exotic excursions Virgin Forest at Sunset (negro attacked by a leopard). Artists such as James Whistler, an American working in London also were inspired by the French when we note his views of the Thames by night, Nocturne in blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge.

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, Gaughuin, 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.

Freedom in the Twentieth Century

Freed from many old constraints artists began to experiment more and more with happy results: Henri Matisse (1869-1954) The Blue Room, and the Fauves with vivid and highly decorative motifs, Raoul Dufy with sketchy frivolity and bright 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 or some other means. Cubism was a continuation of Cezannes' explorations, breaking down the landscape into its geometric forms, as created in France, by Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque and Pablo Picasso, Factory at Horta de Ebra1909. Paul Klee, a Swiss, Idyll in a Garden City, explored an organic and whimsical world whilst Klimt, in Austria, Chateau Above the Lake1908 and and Marc Chagall, The Repose of the Poelandscapes of a long ago, Russia Jewish life and country life 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 Persistence of Memoryand an incredible technical facility and inventiveness to match. Rene Magritte in Belgium whose beautifully 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, Impression V (The Park)1911, the first of the abstractionists, Piet Mondrian, Dutch, The Tree 1912, Umberto Boccioni, Italy, Morning 1909, Franz Marc Roe Deer in the Wood, 1913-14, Oscar Kokoschka, Austria, Tre Croci Pass in the Dolomites, Giorgio Morandi, Italy, Landscape 1925, Max Ernst, Germany, Europe After the Rain 1940-42, Graham Sutherland, England, Welsh Landscape 1973, Jean Dubuffet, Ice Landscape 1954, 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 in the wonderful artists and paintings of the new paradise. The popular Bernard Buffet, France, 1928-1999, with his black outlines, reminiscent of stain glass, kept the vision of his beloved capital alive, telling us, Painting, we do not talk about it, we do not analyse 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 programmer 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, 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. 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 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 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) Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865). 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) and Heade created dramatic thunderstorms as, At the Shore (1870-1).

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. 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) 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.

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). 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) 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. 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) combined these elements of style, a new vision for a new century.

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 it is his brand of Fauvism and 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.

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.



Jan Parker, Benny Anderson, and Dory Grade.

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.[3]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.

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.]

Notes

  1. ↑ Modern Painters, volume three, contains the relevant section, "Of the novelty of landscape".
  2. ↑ Clark, Landscape into Art, preface.
  3. ↑ "Landscapes" in Virtual Vault, an online exhibition of Canadian historical art at Library and Archives Canada

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • 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

External links

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