painting - Landscape art
Photograph by DCTWINKIE5500on Flickr.
Some schools adopted a less refined style, with smaller views giving greater emphasis to the foreground. DĂĽrer 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 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. In woodcuts a large blank space can cause the paper to sag during printing, so DĂĽrer 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.
They were often also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other. 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.
The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases. The word entered the English language at the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art; it was not used to describe real vistas before 1725. 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.
Impressionism Archip Kuindshi, Morning on the Dnieper River 1881. Paul CĂ©zanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1882-1885, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 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.
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. 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 become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting. In Europe, as John Ruskin said, In Clark s analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches: the acceptance of descriptive symbols, a curiosity about the facts of nature, the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature, and 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 became a general tendency.
Turner and Samuel Palmer. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work.
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. 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. Landscapes were idealized, mostly reflecting a pastoral ideal drawn from classical poetry which was first fully expressed by Giorgione and the young Titian, and remained associated above all with hilly wooded Italian landscape, which was depicted by artists from Northern Europe who had never visited Italy, just as plain-dwelling literati in China and Japan painted vertiginous mountains.
Though often young artists were encouraged to visit Italy to experience Italian light, many Northern european artists could make their living selling Italianate landscapes without ever bothering to make the trip. Post-Impressionism Landscape painting has been called China s greatest contribution to the art of the world , The decisive shift to a monochrome landscape style, almost devoid of figures, is attributed to Wang Wei (699-759), also famous as a poet.
The best examples of Canadian landscape art can be found in the works of the Group of Seven, prominent in the 1920s. Although certainly less dominant in the period after World War I, many significant artists still painted landscapes in the wide variety of styles exemplified by Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Milton Avery, Peter Doig, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney and Sidney Nolan. John Constable, 1821, The Hay Wain. Several landscapists are known to have made drawings and watercolour sketches from nature, but the evidence for early oil painting being done outside is limited.
Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. Barbizon school Camille Pissarro, Lordship Lane Station, c.
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. 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. Li Kan, Bamboos and Rock c.
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. 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. 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.
Only copies of his works survive - their status again much disputed. The landscape studies by DĂĽrer 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.
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. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht DĂĽrer, 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.
Romanticism Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, c. Western watercolour is a more tonal medium, even with underdrawing visible. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Seacoast in Moonlight, 1890, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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. Landscape photography has been very important since the 19th century, and is covered by its own article. The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap originally meaning a patch of cultivated ground, and then an image.
1300 AD., China Tao Chi, late 17th century China Tang Yin, A Fisher in Autumn, 1523 AD., China Tenshō Shūbun, a Zen Buddhist monk, an early figure in the revival of Chinese styles in Japan. 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 Chinese style generally showed only a distant view, or used dead ground or mist to avoid that difficulty. A major contrast between landscape painting in the West and East Asia has been that while in the West until the 19th century it occupied a low position in the accepted hierarchy of genres, in East Asia the classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was the most prestigous form of visual art. Though not named at the time as a specific genre, the popularity of Roman ruins inspired many Dutch landscape painters of the period to paint the ruins of their own region, such as monasteries and churches ruined after the Beeldenstorm.
Yamato-e style of Japanese painting. 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. 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 they had assumed 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.
There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting, as well as a distinct style of Italianate landscape. 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 MĂ´le 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.
In the 18th century, watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits.
Die BrĂĽcke, an Expressionist group active after 1905. Edward Hopper, Road in Maine, 1914. 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.
Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. 1870.
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. Aesthetic theories in both regions gave the highest status to the works seen to require the most imagination from the artist.
A coastal scene in the Turin-Milan Hours has a sky overcast with carefully observed clouds. In the West this was history painting, but in East Asia it was the imaginary landscape, whose most famous practitioners were, at least in theory, amateur literati, including several Emperors of both China and Japan.
Fauvism a Modernist movement in Paris active from 1900-1907. Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Naked Playing People, 1910. 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.
Proto-American Modernist associated with Tonalism. Wassily Kandinsky Der Blaue Reiter 1903. 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.
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. Other painters who never crossed the Alps could make money selling Rhineland landscapes, and still others for constructing fantasy scenes for a particular commission such as Cornelis de Man s view of Smeerenburg in 1639. Compositional formulae using elements like the repoussoir were evolved which remain influential in modern photography and painting, notably by Poussin The Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather.
If they include any figures, they are very often such persons, or sages, contemplating the mountains. Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition.
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. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature.
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. 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. However in the West, history painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate, so the theory did not entirely work against the development of landscape painting – for several centuries landscapes were regularly promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene, typically religious or mythological. 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. During the Fourteenth century Giotto di Bondone and his followers began to acknowledge nature in their work, increasingly introducing elements of the landscape as the background setting for the action of the figures in their paintings.
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 example, had developed. Reading in a Bamboo Grove, 1446, Japan KanĹŤ Masanobu, 15th century founder of the KanĹŤ school, which dominated Japanese brush painting until the 19th century, Zhou Maoshu Appreciating Lotuses, hanging scroll The Bridge at Ubi a famous screen composition, found in many 16th or 17th century versions, showing the colourful abstracted style of the professional painters.
1867, Ville d’Avray National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Associated with American realism and members of the Ashcan School. Milton Avery, Green Sea 1958, a painting at lands end. Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape I,(Landscape No.
Der Blaue Reiter, an Expressionist group active from 1911–1914. Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure, 1905, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 2, 1970: An example of aerial landscape art, with no horizon and no sky. .
Post-Impressionism Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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.
The earliest pure landscapes with no human figures are frescos from Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE. The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui ( mountain-water ), or pure landscape, in which the only sign of human life is usually a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, 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. Both the Roman and Chinese traditions typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains – in China often with waterfalls and in Rome often including sea, lakes or rivers. 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 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made special efforts in this direction, but it was not until the introduction of ready-mixed oil paints in tubes in the 1870s, followed by the portable box easel , that painting en plein air became widely practiced. A curtain of mountains at the back of the landscape is standard in wide Roman views and even more so in Chinese landscapes. Indeed, certain styles were so popular that they became formulas that could be copied again and again. The popularity of exotic landscape scenes can be seen in the success of the painter Frans Post, who spent the rest of his life painting Brazilian landscapes after a trip there in 1636-1644.
Bay Area Figurative School, a Californian Abstract Expressionist Figurative group active after 1953. Jane Frank (1918-1986), Aerial Series: Dorado no. 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, for example, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
1), 1963, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
