A Brief History of Landscape Painting

It seems like common sense that before I embark on the next assignment I should familiarise myself with how landscape has been portrayed through the years. My knowledge of art history is sketchy at best, although there are three specific research projects in this section to begin to remedy this, and it seemed that researching the development of the genre would help place the practical exercises in context.

My first brief in this assignment was to look at how different artists have depicted landscape, so it seems logical to examine the development of landscape painting in an historical timeline, particularly as my knowledge of art history prior to the twentieth century is practically non-existent.

Landscape has been painted from Classical times, although more often used as a decorative mural on villa walls than as a subject in its own right. It did not gain popularity until the Renaissance, when the idea of the land as a place for pleasure was reborn. Initially it was used as a backdrop to religious scenes or portraits, as shown in this work Madonna and child with Saints (c. 1454) by Alessio Baldovinetti.

As accuracy in depiction improved, so did the proportions of the figures within them, and there was increased use of colour to suggest the mood of the overall composition. This process continued to evolve through the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

By the seventeenth century there were two main schools of landscape. The Italian school remained idealised and classical, and was not highly regarded as standalone landscape representation, as portraiture was still seen as preferable. In the Netherlands, recently free of Spanish rule, people eschewed the Catholic artworks and found national pride in depictions of their own country’s landscape. However, the use of light and colour continued to be heavily influenced by the Italian style at the end of the century, and artists such as Aelbert Cuyp produced mannered and stylistic works on these lines. A typical example of his work, Landscape with a Hunt (1650-55), is shown below.

In the eighteenth century, the fashionable “Grand Tour” set wanted to buy souvenirs of the places in Europe they visited. In a grandiose forerunner to the picture postcard, artists responded to demand for landscapes inhabited by romantic ruins or dramatic architecture. Sometimes the artist would travel with their wealthy patron, recording the adventures of the Tour. One of the best known artists of the day was Canaletto, as Venice was one of the most popular destinations.

Closer to home the focus moved to France and England in respect of a new landscape tradition. In France, Watteau invented the “fete galante”, pastoral idylls showing picnics and walks in the countryside. They have a fantasy element in their carefully constructed arrangements and several suggest quite racy exploits in the course of the “picnic”.

Watteau, Le fetes Venitiennes, (c.1718)

 Meanwhile Gainsborough in England was making preliminary studies and even models to make his landscapes more accurate, although it is interesting to note that his group portraits set in landscape have all the quality of bad Photoshopping in respect of the lighting on the figures (a case of giving the customer what they want?!), and it is the rural and peasant views which seem to integrate across the picture surface.

 

Across the Atlantic, American artists were using the landscape as a means to create their sense of history, often on an epic scale to reflect the enormity of the new land they now roamed, or emphasising the raw power of nature. Thomas Moran’s paintings of Yellowstone helped to persuade Congress to award its National Park status.

Thomas Moran, “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” (1872)

When photography was invented in the nineteenth century, artists were freed from their former role of merely recording the scene and could seek out new ways of portraying it. New equipment, such as premixed paint in portable tubes and boxes, allowed artists to paint outdoors and have a direct experience of the landscape, and the railways allowed them to travel more readily. By the latter half of the century, the Impressionists were exhibiting work which appeared unfinished, but was all about catching the light and mood of the moment.

Claude Monet, Poplars on the River Epte (1891)

 Art was rebelling against the strictures of the old Academies.

New media in the twentieth century has opened up many different ways to portray landscape. Many new styles and movements developed, and new techniques were employed in increasingly unreal or abstract renditions of landscape. Urbanisation has now had an impact on subject matter, possibly best known in Lowry’s depictions of industrial townscapes. Below is shown “Market scene in a Northern Town” (1939).

In some cases, landscape became a means to express an emotional journey, much as Terry Frost does with his “A Walk along the Harbour” (1960), left, and Peter Lanyon with “Porthleven” (1951), right.

       

 

As environmental awareness grows, a picture can often have a political or environmental message about the plight of the countryside. Hawaiian artist Christian Reise Lasser uses colourful marine landscapes to celebrate and raise awareness of the fragile shore around his native islands, often using a split composition to show both surface and underwater landscape. The Majestic Kingdom is a typical example of this device and is shown below.

Other artists have taken the tools they habitually used and have explored new ways of working with them, both pushing the medium to its limits and integrating new media and substrates. A particular favourite of mine is Michael Morgan, who uses watercolour in a way I have never seen before to create richly textured imagined landscapes.

In the twenty-first century, there are now a wide range of approaches to landscape. New technology has brought new ways of creating art in the digital age. Satellite imagery has inspired some artists, myself included, to paint landscapes seen from space, as they seek a distant objectivity from the immediate pressures of our society, and the growth of digital media has been embraced by some, shown most recently by David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2012) an i-Pad generated landscape exhibition of 2012, in which he has used the most cutting edge technology to revisit the countryside around his native birthplace.