Landscape art

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Themistokles von Eckenbrecher, View of Laerdalsoren, on the Sognefjord, 1901.

Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather often is an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases.

The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered English at the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art; it is not found used of real vistas before 1725.[1]

Contents

[edit] History

Landscape with scene from the Odyssey, Rome, c. 60-40 BCE.
Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, a very early Chinese landscape, c. 600.
Bas-de-page of the Baptism of Christ, Hand G, Turin-Milan Hours, Flanders c. 1420?
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors
Jan van Goyen, Dune landscape; an example of the "tonal" style in Dutch Golden Age painting.
Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682 Claude Lorrain. The landscape as history painting.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog a classic image of German Romanticism.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Park at Petworth House, c. 1830
Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes (1859). Church was part of the American Hudson River School.

The earliest forms of art around the world depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on human and animal figures rather than the landscape setting. For a real sense of landscape, some rough system of perspective is needed, and this seems from literary evidence to have first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. We have rather more survivals from Ancient Roman art, from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescoes of landscapes decorating rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii, Herculaneum and elsewhere, and mosaics.

The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui ("mountain-water"), or "pure" landscape, in which any minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the viewer to participate in the experience, arose in about the 8th century CE from increasingly sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, and landscape art of this period retains a classic and much imitated status within the Chinese tradition, although the actual date of surviving reputed 8th century scroll-paintings is unclear.[2]

Both the Roman and Chinese traditions often show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, often backed with a range of spectacular mountains - in China often with waterfalls and in Rome often including sea, lakes or rivers. These were frequently used, as in the example illustrated, to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista, a persistent problem for landscape artists. The Chinese style generally showed only a distant view, or used dead ground or mist to avoid that difficulty.

[edit] Western tradition

In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears almost entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter; the last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space.[3] A revival in interest in nature initially mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos of figures at work or play in front of a background of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject.[4] Several frescos of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.[5]

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. Luxury illuminated manuscripts were very important in the early development of landscape, especially series of the Labours of the Months such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which conventionally showed small genre figures in increasingly large landscape settings. A particular advance is shown in the less well-known Turin-Milan Hours, now largely destroyed by fire, whose developments were reflected in Early Netherlandish painting for the rest of the century. The artist known as "Hand G", probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially successful in effects of light and in a natural-seeming progression from the foreground to the distant view.[6] This was something other artists were to find difficult for a century or more, often solving the problem by showing a landscape background from over the top of a parapet or window-sill, often as from a considerable height.[7]

Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolomeo and others, but pure landscape subjects in painting and printmaking, still small, were first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the German Danube School in the early 16th century. At the same time Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed a style of panoramic landscapes with a high aerial viewpoint that remained influential for a century, being used by Pieter Brueghel the Elder for example. The Italian development of a thorough system of graphical perspective was now known all over Europe, which allowed large and complex views to be painted very effectively.

Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw an explosion of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting. Italian and French landscapes still most often wanted to keep their classification within the hierarchy of genres as history painting by including small figures to represent a scene from classical mythology or the Bible, as in the works of Claude Lorrain. Most Dutch landscapes were relatively small, but landscapes in Flemish Baroque painting, still usually peopled, were often very large, above all in the series of great works that Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own houses.

The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigous place in 19th century art than ever before.

In England landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter's rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a bouyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits. The German Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style drawing on the Dutch 17th century had developed. French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would be the most influential in Europe for a century, and in the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time make landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting.

In Europe, as John Ruskin said,[8] and Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant art", 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"[9] 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 and by the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.

The nationalism of the new United Provinces had been a factor in the popularity of Dutch 17th century landscape painting and in the 19th century, as other nations attempted to develop distinctive national schools of painting, the attempt to express the special nature of the landscape of the homeland is a general tendency. In Russia, as in America, the gigantic size of paintings was itself a nationalist statement.

In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late nineteenth century, is probably the best known native development in landscape art. These painters created works of mammoth scale in attempting to capture the epic scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, has much in common with the philosophical ideals of European landscape paintings — a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works which placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of romantic exaggeration, to be sure) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature. The best examples of Canadian landscape art can be found in the works of the Group of Seven, prominent in the 1920s.[10]

[edit] East Asian tradition

"Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys", by Northern Song Dynasty artist Kuo Hsi, 1072

Landscape painting has been called "China's greatest contribution to the art of the world", [11] and owes its special character to the Daoist tradition in Chinese culture.[12] There are increasingly sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects showing hunting, farming or animals from the Han dynasty onwards, with surviving examples mostly in stone or clay reliefs from tombs, which are presumed to follow the prevailing styles in painting, no doubt without capturing the full effect of the original paintings.[13] The exact status of the later copies of reputed works by famous painters (many of whom are recorded in literature) before the 10th century is unclear, but one very fine anonymous 8th? century painting from the Imperial collection, The Emperor Ming Huang travelling in Shu survives in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This shows the entourage riding through vertiginous mountains of the type typical of later paintings, but is in full colour "producing an overall pattern that is almost Persian", in what was evidently the prevailing court style.[14]

Ming landscape of 1597 with collector's seals and poems

The decisive shift to a monochrome landscape style, almost devoid of figures, is attributed to Wang Wei (699-759), also famous as a poet. Only copies of his works survive - their status again much disputed.[15] From the 10th century onwards an increasing number of original paintings survive, and the best works of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) remain among the most highly regarded in what has been an uninterrupted tradition to the present day. Chinese convention valued the paintings of the amateur scholar-gentleman, often a poet as well, over those produced by professionals, though the situation was more complex than that.[16] If they include any figures, they are very often such persons, or sages, contemplating the mountains. Famous works have accumulated numbers of red "appreciation seals", and often poems added by later owners - the Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799) was a prolific adder of his own poems, following earlier Emperors.

The shan shui tradition was never intended to represent actual locations, even when named after after them, as in the convention of the Eight Views.[17] A different style, produced by workshops of professional court artists, painted official views of Imperial tours and ceremonies, with the primary emphasis on highly detailed scenes of crowded cities and grand ceremonials from a high viewpoint. These were painted on scrolls of enormous length in bright colour (example below).

Chinese sculpture also achieves the difficult feat of creating effective landscapes in three dimensions. There is a long tradition of the appreciation of "viewing stones" - naturally formed boulders, typically limestone from the banks of mountain rivers that has been eroded into fantastic shapes, were ransported to the courtyards and gardens of the literati. Probably associated with these is the tradition of carving much smaller boulders of jade or some other semi-precious stone into the shape of a mountain, including tiny figures of monks or sages. Chinese gardens also developed a highly sophisticated aesthetic much earlier than those in the West; the karensansui or Japanese dry garden of Zen Buddhism takes the garden even closer to being a work of sculpture, representing a highly abstracted landscape.

A scene from the Biography of the Priest Ippen yamato-e scroll, 1299

Japanese art initially adapted Chinese styles to reflect their far greater interest in narrative themes in art, with scenes set in landscapes mixing with those showing palace or city scenes using the same high view point, cutting away roofs as necessary. These appeared in the very long yamato-e scrolls of scenes illustrating the Tale of Genji and other subjects, mostly from the 12th and 13th centuries. The concept of the gentleman-amateur painter had little resonance in feudal Japan, where artists were generally professionals with a strong bond to their master and his school, rather than the classic artists from the distant past, from which Chinese painters tended to draw their inspiration.[18] Painting was initially fully-coloured, often brightly so, and the landscape never overwhelms the figures who are often rather over-sized. The scene illustrated at right is from a scroll that in full measures 37.8 cm x 802.0 cm, for only one of twelve scrolls illustrating the life of a Buddhist monk; like their Western counterparts, monasteries and temples commissioned many such works, and these have had a better chance of survival than courtly equivalents.[19] Even rarer are survivals of landscape screens and hanging scrolls, which seem to have common in court circles - the Tale of Genji has an episode where members of the court produce the best paintings from their collections for a competition. These were closer to Chinese shan shui, but still fully coloured.[20]

Many more pure landscape subjects survive from the 15th century onwards; several key artists are Zen Buddhist clergy, and worked in a monochrome style with greater emphasis on brush strokes in the Chinese manner. Some schools adopted a less refined style, with smaller views giving greater emphasis to the foreground. A type of image that had an enduring appeal for Japanese artists, and came to be called the "Japanese style", is in fact first found in China. This combines one or more large birds, animals or trees in the foreground, typically to one side in a horizontal composition, with a wider landscape beyond, often only covering portions of the background. Later versions of this style often dispensed with a landscape background altogether.

The ukiyo-e style that developed from the 16th century onwards, first in painting and then in coloured woodblock prints that were cheap and widely available, initially concentrated on the human figure, individually and in groups. But from the late 18th century landscape ukiyo-e developed under Hokusai and Hiroshige to become much the best known type of Japanese landscape art.[21]

[edit] Techniques

Most early landscapes are clearly imaginary, although from very early on townscape views are clearly intended to represent actual cities, with varying degrees of accuracy. Various techniques were used to simulate the randomness of natural forms in invented compositions: the medieval advice of Cennino Cennini to copy ragged crags from small rough rocks was apparently followed by both Poussin and Thomas Gainsborough, while Degas copied cloud forms from a crumpled handkerchief held up against the light.[22] The system of Alexander Cozens used random ink blots to give the basic shape of an invented landscape, to be elaborated by the artist.

The distinctive background view across Lake Geneva to the Le Môle peak in the The Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Konrad Witz (1444) is often cited as the first Western rural landscape to show a specific scene.[23] The landscape studies by Dürer clearly represent actual scenes, which can be identified in many cases, and were at least partly made on the spot; the drawings by Fra Bartolomeo also seem clearly sketched from nature. Dürer's finished works seem generally to use invented landscapes, although the spectacular bird's-eye view in his engraving Nemesis shows an actual view in the Alps, with additional elements.

A curtain of mountains at the back of the landscape is standard in wide Roman views and even more so in Chinese landscapes. Relatively little space is given to the sky in early works in either tradition; the Chinese often used mist or clouds between mountains, and also sometimes show clouds in the sky far earlier than Western artists, who initially mainly use clouds as supports or covers for divine figures or heaven. Both panel paintings and miniatures in manuscripts usually had a patterned or gold "sky" or background above the horizon until about 1400, but frescos by Giotto and other Italian artists had long shown plain blue skies. The single surviving altarpiece from Melchior Broederlam, completed for Champmol in 1399, has a gold sky populated not only by God and angels, but also a flying bird. A coastal scene in the Turin-Milan Hours has a sky overcast with carefully observed clouds. In woodcuts a large blank space can cause the paper to sag during printing, so Dürer and other artists often include clouds or squiggles representing birds to avoid this.

The monochrome Chinese tradition has used ink on silk or paper since its inception, with a great emphasis on the individual brushstroke to define the ts'un or "wrinkles" in mountain-sides, and the other features of the landscape. Western watercolour is a more tonal medium, even with underdrawing visible.

[edit] Related -scapes

Jane Frank, 1918-1986, Aerial Series: Dorado no. 2, 1970: An example of aerial landscape art, with no horizon and no sky.

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

  • 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.]
Court style panorama Along the River During Qingming Festival, an 18th century copy of a 12th century original. The scroll begins at the right end, and culminates above as the Emperor boards his yacht to join the festive boats on the river. Note the exceptionally large viewing stones placed at the far edge of the inlet.

[edit] See also

Landscape painter

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ OED "Landscape"
  2. ^ Sickman, 182-186
  3. ^ Clark, 17-18
  4. ^ Clark, 23-4; image, another
  5. ^ Now removed to the Palazzo Massimo; Commons images
  6. ^ Clark, 31-2
  7. ^ Clark, 34-37
  8. ^ Modern Painters, volume three, contains the relevant section, "Of the novelty of landscape".
  9. ^ Clark, 15-16.
  10. ^ "Landscapes" in Virtual Vault, an online exhibition of Canadian historical art at Library and Archives Canada
  11. ^ Sickman, 182
  12. ^ Sickman, 54-55
  13. ^ Sickman, 82-84, and 186
  14. ^ Sickman, 182-183. p. 182 quoted.
  15. ^ Sickman, 184-186, and p. 203
  16. ^ Sickman, 304-305
  17. ^ Princeton Univrsity Art Museum Wang Hong (act. ca. 1131-ca. 1161), Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (Xiao-Xiang ba jing)
  18. ^ Paine, 20-21
  19. ^ Paine, 153-154
  20. ^ Paine, 107-108
  21. ^ Paine, 269-272
  22. ^ Clark, 26
  23. ^ Clark, 34

[edit] References

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