landscape painting

landscape painting portrayal of scenes found in the natural world; these scenes are treated as the subject of the work of art rather than as an element in another kind of painting.

Early Landscapes

In the West, the concept of landscape grew very slowly. Nature was traditionally viewed as consisting of isolated objects long before it was appreciated as scene or environment. As a result landscape painting as an independent art was a late development in the West. Many scenes, from the Hellenistic pastoral paintings of antiquity to the religious works of the 16th cent. AD, contained expansive landscape backgrounds, but they were usually subordinated within a narrative context.

The Renaissance and the Sixteenth Century

In Renaissance Italy the study of perspective gave rise to a careful rendering of scenery according to conventional formulas. Giorgione and the Venetian painters excelled at pastoral vistas that recalled scenes from classical literature. Flemish works enhanced by meticulous landscape detail became popular in Italy and encouraged Patinir and others to cater to this taste. Altdorfer , the Danube painter of the early 16th cent., created some of the first works devoted entirely to landscape.

During and after the Reformation the use of religious subject matter was restricted and numerous artists in the north became specialists in the landscape genre at which, when painting backgrounds of religious works, they had become proficient. These artists, among whom Pieter Bruegel the elder was most notable, were devoted to fantastic scenes painted according to established convention in tones of brown for the foreground, green for the middle ground, and blue for the background panorama. In Rome, Dutch artists, led by Coninxloo , initiated the concept of the ideal landscape.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Claude Lorrain was supreme master of this genre. His serene pastoral works and the heroic compositions of Poussin contrasted with the concurrent Dutch tendency toward realism. The great 17th-century Dutch landscape masters from van Goyen to Ruisdael , Hobbema , and Rembrandt transformed into paint what they saw in the Dutch countryside (see Dutch art ). The Rococo saw a revival of ideal pastoral scenes in the works of Watteau and Gainsborough . The 18th-century Englishman Thomas Girtin was an important influence on future landscape painting.

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

England produced the major late 19th-century landscape masters: the visionary Turner and the poetic Constable . Constable, who greatly influenced the French Romantics, also served as an important inspiration to the Barbizon school in France, whose members returned to the serene pastoral mood. In Germany, C. D. Friedrich sustained the poetic tradition of landscape, as did the luminists of the American Hudson River school . Turner's exploration of the atmospheric effects of light interested Monet , whose plein-air works, forming the basis of impressionism , elevated landscape to the highest position in artists' esteem that it had yet held.

Landscape also became a principal source material of postimpressionism . The exponents of surrealism revealed the fearful power of imaginary landscape. In addition, many of the 20th-century artists working in the abstract idiom have employed both landscape and still life as basic sources for their widely differing work.

Landscape Art in the East

In China landscape art reached extraordinary perfection as early as the 8th cent. It engaged the highest talents during the T'ang, Sung, and Ming dynasties (see Chinese art ). The prominence accorded landscape in both Chinese and Japanese art reflects the esteem for nature characteristic of East Asian religions.

Bibliography

See K. Clark, Landscape into Art (1949, repr. 1961); Z. Szabo, Landscape Painting in Watercolor (1971); P. Monahan, Landscape Painting (1985); J. Arthur, Spirit of Place: Contemporary Landscape Painting and the American Tradition (1989); A. Wilton and T. Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (2002).

landscape painting Art of portraying natural scenery. While landscape painting was central to the art of the East, especially China, the West did not recognize it as a separate genre until the 16th century. Landscape painting came into full flower in 17th-century Holland; Jacob van Ruisdael is still regarded as the greatest Dutch landscape painter. A different tradition developed in Italy after Annibale Carracci invented the so-called ‘ideal landscape’. Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin arranged natural elements into artificial compositions. In the 19th century, mystical and awe-inspired romantic landscapes were created by painters such as Friedrich in Germany and Turner in Britain, as well as a number of North American artists. Corot and Constable introduced a more naturalistic approach, which led in turn to the enormous popularity that landscape achieved through impressionism. The 20th-century abstract and surrealist painters have reinvented the genre.

land·scape / ˈlan(d)ˌskāp/ • n. 1. all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal: the giant cacti that dominate this landscape. ∎  a picture representing an area of countryside: [as adj.] a landscape painter. ∎  the genre of landscape painting. ∎ fig. the distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity: the event transformed the political landscape. 2. [as adj.] (of a page, book, or illustration, or the manner in which it is set or printed) wider than it is high. Compare with portrait (sense 2). • v. [tr.] (usu. be landscaped) improve the aesthetic appearance of (a piece of land) by changing its contours, adding ornamental features, or planting trees and shrubs: the site has been tastefully landscaped [as n.] (landscaping) the company spent $15,000 on landscaping. DERIVATIVES: land·scap·er n. land·scap·ist / -ˌskāpist/ n.