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.
Richard Wilson is often regarded as the father of British landscape painting, his classical canvases influenced by his years spent living in Italy. His contemporary, Thomas Gainsborough, instead looked to the Dutch to inspire the naturalistic depictions of his native Suffolk.
Both these artists paved the way for John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, important examples of British romanticism who rejected classical restraint in favour of an emotional response to nature. Constable continually painted the countryside around the Stour Valley where he grew up – working directly from nature, he is especially known for his ruins and clouds. Turner was an intrepid traveller, whose dramatic seascapes veer into abstraction.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, these painters, alongside artists such as Philip de Loutherbourg and John 'Warwick' Smith, also detailed the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world.
Impressionist painters worked outside, en plein air, to capture modern life in both urban and rural settings. The landscapes of French artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley serve as records of changing light, their informal compositions and loose brushstrokes suggesting a spontaneous approach.
Post-Impressionist painters such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat moved away from the naturalism of Impressionism in favour of a more emotive style, defining their landscapes through colour and form.
After the First World War, which British war artists such as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and C. R. W. Nevinson detailed in harrowing detail, many artists rejected the avant-garde in favour of tradition, finding solace in a romanticised view of the landscape.
Nash's later rural depictions were inspired by Surrealism. Other Surrealist artists including Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Ithell Colquhoun similarly created uncanny landscapes inspired by the unconscious.
The post-war period also saw artists experiment with abstraction, including the St Ives School. The Neo-Romantics such as John Piper and Graham Sutherland made work that was melancholic and emotive to reflect a post-Second World War reality.
In the second half of the twentieth century, landscape expanded to include urban and industrial depitions, including those of North-West England by L. S. Lowry. In the 1960s, Land artists made work directly into the landscape.
Imelda Barnard
Martin Holman
Ashley Tan
Paul Spencer-Longhurst
Andrew Greg
Andrew Lambirth
Jessie Petheram
David Haycock
Angela Summerfield
James Trollope
Imelda Barnard
Jonathan Hajdamach
Maria Grazia Bonfiglio
.jpg)
Mari Griffith
Claire Stewart
Andrew Lambirth
Alexandra Harris
