Landscape painting, the depiction of natural scenery in art. Landscape paintings may capture mountains, valleys, bodies of water, fields, forests, and coasts and may or may not include man-made structures as well as people. Although paintings from the earliest ancient and Classical periods included natural scenic elements, landscape as an independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition until the Renaissance in the 16th century. In the Eastern tradition, the genre can be traced back to 4th-century-ce China.
The following article treats only the Western tradition. For further information on other landscape painting traditions, search by country or region—e.g., Chinese painting, Japanese art, South Asian arts: Visual arts.
Landscape painting in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries
Though landscape painting was still not a genre in its own right and was considered low in the art academy’s rigid hierarchy of subject matter, background landscapes became increasingly detailed in compositions that emerged in Venice in the late 15th century. Landscapes were notable in works by Giovanni Bellini (The Agony in the Garden, c. 1465; Saint Jerome Reading in a Landscape, c. 1480–85) and, slightly later, in those by Giorgione (The Tempest, c. 1505; Adoration of the Shepherds, 1505/10). By the mid-16th century, artists in northern Europe—particularly those of the Danube school, such as Joachim Patinir and Albrecht Altdorfer—were creating paintings which, though often populated with biblical figures, truly celebrated the beauty of nature in its own right. Later in the 16th century, Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder became a master landscape painter, specializing in colourful, highly detailed scenic views (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558; Hunters in the Snow, 1565; The Harvesters, 1565).
The 17th century ushered in the classical, or ideal, landscape, which set scenes in the mythic and idyllic Arcadia of ancient Greece. The leading practitioners of the classical landscape were the French-born Italy-based artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. With their idyllic scenes and classically ordered, harmonious compositions, Poussin and Claude attempted to elevate the reputation of the landscape genre in a variety of ways: by attaching metaphorical meaning to the natural elements of their paintings, by depicting mythological or biblical stories set in elaborate natural settings, and by emphasizing the heroic power of nature over humanity.
The other prominent landscape tradition of the 17th century emerged from the Netherlands in the work of Dutch artists Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and Meindert Hobbema. The sky, often ominously cloudy and filling half or more of the canvas, played a central role in setting the tone of a scene. The Dutch artists of that period infused the elements of their compositions with metaphorical meaning and made use of the visual impact of small figures in a vast landscape to express ideas on humanity and its relationship to almighty nature.
The centre of landscape painting during the 18th-century Rococo period shifted from Italy and the Netherlands to England and France. French painters Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher developed lyrical and romantic outdoor scenes that, with precise detail and delicate colouring, glorified nature. Their lighthearted landscapes—called fêtes galantes—were decorative vignettes filled with beautifully dressed men and women enjoying outdoor amusements and leisure time. The English Rococo landscape tradition was led by Richard Wilson, who painted in Italy as well as in his native England. His best-known painting, Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle (c. 1765), which shows a group of three people fishing at a lake framed by mountains, exemplifies his serene style. Other English landscape painters of note include Thomas Girtin, John Robert Cozens, and Thomas Gainsborough (who was also well known for his portraiture).
The Romantic landscape and the first half of the 19th century
Landscape artists of the 19th century embraced the wide-reaching Romantic movement and infused their compositions with passion and drama. It was in the 19th century that landscape painting finally emerged as a respectable genre within the art academies of Europe and gained a strong following in the United States as well. In England two of the foremost landscape painters were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Both artists worked on a grand scale to express the power of nature. They were both masters at capturing on canvas the atmospheric qualities of the weather. Constable, however, worked in a realist mode with a high level of precision in his landscapes of the English countryside, whereas Turner, particularly later in his career, produced wildly expressionistic and atmospheric seascapes that verged on abstraction.
In Germany the Romantic landscape was epitomized in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings were charged with emotional and religious symbolism and could be interpreted allegorically. Friedrich’s The Cross in the Mountains (c. 1808)—a painting of a crucifix illuminated by the sun’s rays at the summit of mountain—expresses a spiritual sentiment by way of the natural elements. French artists Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau, and others were part of the Barbizon school (1830s–70s), a group that painted in and around the Fontainebleau forest. The artists, though only loosely tied to one another, were united in their interest in capturing carefully observed nature. They eschewed the formal balanced compositions of their predecessors in preference for a truer, if less harmonious, depiction of their surroundings.
In the United States the Hudson River school (1825–70) painters were centred in the Hudson River valley in New York. In paintings of the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River, and the wilderness of New England and beyond, the artists captured dramatic effects of light and shade, the finest details of their subject matter, and celebrated the unique beauty of still-untouched areas of the American landscape. The group’s first members—Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Doughty—inspired numerous younger painters including Frederic Edwin Church, Fitz Henry Lane, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade. The invention of the tin tube for paint (1841) and the invention of the portable collapsible easel (also in the mid-19th century) revolutionized the landscape genre by allowing artists to venture out of the studio and study and paint their subjects firsthand. Outdoor painting became the dominant practice of the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century.
The Impressionist landscape and its impact
With the freedoms afforded by newly invented tools, the Impressionists moved away from Romanticism and realistic renderings, favouring a more subjective form of expression. Artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot worked outdoors—en plein air—and recorded in paint the effects of light and weather. Their sketchy application of paint, visible brushwork, and inventive use of colour was groundbreaking and influenced generations of artists, including Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne (e.g., Mont Saint-Victoire series, 1880s–1906), Vincent van Gogh (e.g., A Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889), and Paul Gauguin (e.g., Tahitian Landscape, 1893). Neo-Impressionism, a parallel movement among the Post-Impressionists, was spearheaded by Georges Seurat. Artists used pointillism—the application of dots of pure pigment juxtaposed with one another so that from afar they blend into harmonious tones—to capture the essence of nature’s colours in works such as Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884–86) and Paul Signac’s The Jetty at Cassis, Opus 198 (1889).
Modernism and abstract landscapes
The 20th century saw a continued interest in nontraditional approaches to painting the landscape. From about 1898 to 1906 in France, the Fauvists (after fauves, “wild beasts”)—André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck—applied brilliant colours directly from their tubes of paint onto the canvas, often leaving parts of the canvas exposed. They, like the Impressionists, painted from nature, but they emphasized the two-dimensionality of their surface and used colour as a mode of expression rather than as the tool with which to capture atmospheric effects and the elements of nature.
In Germany at that time, the Expressionists and the painters of Die Brücke group (1905–13) in Dresden were also guided by an expressive use of bold colour and line. Artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner applied dark contours and deep colours to canvas and showed a move further toward abstraction. An offshoot of Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter (1911–14) was a group of somewhat loosely associated artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc, who all attached great spiritual value to their work and believed in the emotional power of colour. Marc’s numerous landscapes with animals are composed of simple forms painted in bold primary colours. About 1913 another Expressionist artist, Ludwig Meidner, painted scenes that became known as his “apocalyptic landscapes”; the title and the distorted and fantastical imagery distinguish those works from classical landscape painting. Meidner incorporated a psychological component, betraying the anxiety and fear in the atmosphere leading up to World War I.
The artists soon to invent Cubism looked to Post-Impressionist Cézanne for inspiration when creating a new, highly geometric type of landscape. Cézanne’s method of relying on geometric forms (spheres, cylinders, and cones) to create volume guided Georges Braque’s early Cubist experiments in his series of paintings of L’Estaque (1908), a seaside village near Marseille that Cézanne had made famous in numerous works. Braque rejected the spatial conventions traditionally used to create volume and depth on the two-dimensional surface, methods such as linear perspective and the classical framing devices as used in Romantic landscape compositions.
The 1920s saw the rise of the Surrealism in Paris. Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Joan Miró, and others delved into the subconscious for subject matter. The Surreal landscape depicted strange tableaux of fantasy and myth set in a seminatural world. The Surrealists painted landscapes that featured unexpected juxtapositions between the natural and the imagined world, the most famous of which was The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Dalí.
Modern American painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley took to landscape painting in earnest and traveled the U.S. and beyond to paint in that style. Marin and Dove, in particular, were pioneers of the abstract landscape. The urban landscape, or cityscape, also took a prominent place in the modernist practice—by O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler, for example. In the mid-20th century artists such as Richard Diebenkorn (Berkeley No. 52, 1955) and Helen Frankenthaler (Desert Pass, 1976), among others, embraced the freedom of abstraction to transform by way of line, colour, and form the last remaining remnants of the traditional landscape into mere suggestions of the natural and built world.