Landscape painting refers to the depiction of natural, rather than man-made, scenery. Before landscape emerged as a distinct genre during the Renaissance, it appeared as background in narrative religious and historical works. A popular subject in seventeenth-century Dutch art, landscape fell in and out of favour, but by the nineteenth century it had evolved into a site of experimentation for many avant-garde artists.
In 1648 the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) decided to classify five hierarchies of genre (or type) in painting.
Landscape was ranked the second lowest – below history painting, which was placed highest, portraiture and scenes from daily life (which is usually called genre painting in art history), but above still life, which was ranked lowest.
Their reasoning behind what we might see today as quite a snobbish judgement was that landscape and still life did not include human subjects – and therefore could be understood with little intellectual effort. However, the evolution of the landscape genre over the centuries means many works do include scenes with human activity or people in nature.
A picture representing an expanse of natural scenery. Landscape featured in the backgrounds of many Renaissance paintings and in late medieval depictions of the months of the year and the four seasons. It really emerged as an independent genre in the 17th century with the classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682) and the visual celebration in pictures of their newly independent country by the painters of the United Provinces (the present-day Netherlands).
Landscape painting flourished in the Netherlands from the 1600s. The term landscape derives from the Dutch word lanschap, used to describe an area of land.
During the Dutch Golden Age, depictions of the local countryside featured alongside images of villages, windmills and scenes of rural life. Prominent landscape painters from this period include Hendrick Avercamp, Rembrandt, Jan van Goyen, Meindert Hobbema, and Jacob van Ruisdael, who is known for his classical take on the genre.
The representation of cows in Dutch landscapes by artists such as Paulus Potter and Aelbert Cuyp served as symbols of Dutch identity following the fight against Spanish rule.
Seascapes by Willem van de Velde I and Ludolf Backhuysen were also popular thanks to their celebration of Dutch trade and maritime competence.
French artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain were masters of the classical landscape, which emerged in the seventeenth century, having spent much of their careers in Rome. Many French artists keen to paint from nature followed this tradition and travelled to Italy.
This idealised approach continued until the late eighteenth century when the neoclassical painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes encouraged the Academy to recognise historical landscape painting. Valenciennes' intervention had a huge impact on later landscape artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who was also influenced by Italian art.
From around 1830, the Barbizon school artists, including Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Millet and Charles-François Daubigny, rejected this prevailing neoclassicism in favour of a more realistic style. Anticipating Impressionism, these painters were known for painting outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau.
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