The Best Books about Landscape Art

Albert Handell studied at the Art Students League of New York. Since 1961, he has had over 30 one-man shows, and has received over 70 prizes and awards. Handell's work is in numerous private, public, and museum collections.

His paintings are in many public and private collections and numerous museums.

Albert Handell is a Master Pastelist of the Pastel Society of America, and was the third living artist to be inaugurated into the Pastel Hall of Fame.

He is the author of several books on pastel and oil painting, including Oil Painting Workshop and Intuitive Light, and teaches several workshops annually. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kevin is a founding member and past president of the prestigious Plein Air Painters of America, and an Honorary Member of the Oil Painters of America. He is a highly respected artist for oil paintings with work represented by galleries in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Wyoming and Texas. He is also a sought after workshop instructor and his work is seen regularly in art magazines including The Artist's Magazine, American Artist and International Artist.

David Curtis is a well known UK landscape artist. In 1992, he won the first prize in the most well known watercolour competition in the UK Singer and Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition and has also won many other prestigious awards for his art. Essentially a "plein air" and figurative painter, he works in both oil and watercolours and is a Member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

He's also the author of a number of art instruction books (see below) and is the subject of a number of instructional DVDs.

This is his website - David Curtis

Also see The Watercolorist's Essential Notebook - Landscapes listed under "BOOKS: Modern Classics"

People love water in paintings - whether it's oceans, seas, rivers or lakes.

Thomas Girtin (1775-1802) was one of Britain's greatest landscape painters. In a tragically short career, he developed a technique that revolutionized watercolor painting and produced powerful works, providing one of the cornerstones of Romantic landscape imagery. His talent was such that his friend J.M.W. Turner acknowledged: "If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved."

"'I do not consider myself at work without I am before a six-foot canvas.'
John Constable, 1821"

Most books are available in very good condition and at a reasonable price. I can personally recommend the gazeteers for highlighting places which have interesting landscapes to paint

Tonalism was popular between the 1880's and early 1900's. It represented a convergence of styles and was chiefly found in landscapes executed with soft painterly application and muted color harmonies. Tonalism had two major branches; the American followers of the French Barbizon school, and Aestheticism, exemplified by the works of the American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Tonalists tended to follow one style or the other, or combined features of both. Tonalism was seen as both sophisticated and was also regarded as a truly American tendency, and was seen as being patriotic.

Principle Painters of Tonalism Movement

Ralph Albert Blakelock American, 1847-1919
Thomas Wilmer Dewing American, 1851-1938]
Robert Swain Gifford American, 1840-1905
Alexander Thomas Harrison American, 1854 -1929
Lowell Birge Harrison American, 1854-1929
George Inness American, 1825-1894
John La Farge American, 1835-1910
Arthur Frank Mathews American, 1860-1945
John Francis Murphy American, 1853-1921
Albert Pinkham Ryder American, 1847-1917
John Henry Twachtman American,1853-1902
Julian Alden Weir American,1852-1919
James Abbott McNeill Whistler American, 1843-1903

Wolf Kahn's beautiful and lyrical landscapes are among America's most popular contemporary paintings. He was born in 1927 and came to the USA as a refyugee from Nazi Germany. He is is based in New York but also teaches master classes in painting and pastels throughout the country.

He works in oils and pastels

Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Since the early 1960s he has emerged as one of the essential painters of the postwar period, pioneering photorealism with paintings made from found photographs (amateur snapshots, advertisements and book and magazine illustrations) and then from his own photographs.

His work has also profoundly engaged with and influenced such genres as Pop and abstract art. A retrospective of Richter's work was shown in 2001 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was one of the largest ever organized there for a living artist, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.