Landscape into Art

The word "landscape" comes from the Dutch "landtskip" meaning a sheaf, a piece of cultivated land and, in relation to painting, first appears in Graphice by Henry Peacham in 1606.

Landscape painting is, traditionally, a genre of art that depicts natural scenery. I think of landscape paintings as frames of reference. The frames of reference in landscape painting are as varied as individual artists, historic periods, cultural traditions, schools of thought, geographic locations and the weather.

I'll provide you with my own exploration of Landscape Painting and a lot of good references. As often as I can, I will have the artists and authors speak for themselves. As a painter working with landscapes, myself, I will, of course, comment on what strikes me.

This is a place to begin.

Image: Landscape 5 by Suzanne McDermott

These are books for depth and breadth. Two of them are out of print but you can find used copies if you keep an eye out.

It will probably come as no surprise that my list begins with Kenneth Clark's Landscape into Art. Based on a series of lectures he delivered during his first year (1946-47) as Slade Professor to the University of Oxford, this perfect little book examines with profound understanding and compassion the artistic process, human nature, western civilization, and the history of landscape painting.

Another good read and quite contemporary is Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews. Andrews raises very interesting conceptual and perceptual issues although I really wish that he had not used Kenneth Clark as a sparring partner. It seems as though Andrews took several of Clark's comments out of context to make his own point rather than reflecting on Clark's broader context and deeper meaning. While Clark was a poet, Andrews is more contemporary critic but the two books together provide a perspective that can really open your mind.

The older source book is John Ruskin's Modern Painters: Volume 3. Of Many Things, Chapters 11 - 13, to which Clark refers.

For big books with beautiful plates, there's the relatively new Landscape Painting: A History by Nils Buttner, a sweeping review of Western landscapes from Greece through mid-20th century U.S.

Slightly more specific but beautifully done is Landscape from Brueghel to Kandinsky and a personal favorite, out of print but well worth getting your hands on is Curtis O. Baer's Landscape Drawings. This collection of landscape drawings from the 14th c. - 20th c. was assembled by Baer, a brilliant collector. I drag this book to at least one of my drawing classes each term and go through the plates with my students. My copy is showing wear!

My copies of all these books are showing wear because I refer to them frequently. For my historic modules, I refer mostly to the Kenneth Clark and Nils Büttner books. If you're a landscape painter, a fan or collector of landscape paintings, these books belong on your shelf.

This is not, by any means, an attempt at a comprehensive history of landscape painting. Along with suggestions on images, books, ideas, instructions and other links, my intention is to direct you to some historic particulars to give a sense of how the artistic treatment of landscape has developed over the centuries.

To my thinking, it is, for the most part, through individual exploration and expression that development occurs. Individuals certainly don't operate in a vacuum, there's synchronicity, An Idea Who's Time Has Come, and once one artist sees the work of another, the mighty force of influence. I say this because it's too easy to lump artists and artistic events together in terms of centuries, isms, geographic locations, markets and so forth, often neglecting the individual experience at work. Nonetheless, these handles or categories allow us some framework of study and understanding, so I'll proceed to categorize for the sake of this lens with a traditionally broad and sweeping hand.

There are landscapes depicted in the Bhimbetka Cave Paintings and in Egyptian, Cretan and Greek art. Painting is so ephemeral, and history subject to fashionable perspectives that it's difficult, if not impossible, to determine exactly what, if anything, landscape art was about before a certain point.

The most accessible and succinct article on ancient landscape painting can be found in Nils Büttner's Landscape Painting: A History. This module is based on that book's first chapter, The Ancient World.

Büttner feels confident that the history of landscape painting can be started in Ancient Rome. In addition to excavated walls from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere - the illustration of this module is a small section of the Garden landscape, c. 30 BC, from the Villa Vivia near Prima Porta - Büttner cites four literary sources.

In describing interior decoration around 25 BC, Vitruvius describes good taste, "In corridors, however, because of their length, topia, or landscape scenery should serve as decor, which often meant depictions of specific places. One paints, for example, harbors, foothills, shorelines, rivers, springs, seas, temples, forests, mountains..."

Pliny the Elder not only mentions landscape painting in his Naturalis Historia (AD 77), but claims that landscape painting was invented in Rome. He describes Spurius Ludius (Tadius) who painted "country houses, colonnades, garden structures, groves, forests, hills, ponds, seas, rivers, shores, whatever one wished..."

My favorite quote is from Pliny the Younger who writes about country life around AD 100. "You would think you were looking at an idealized, beautifully painted region, not a real one." What sort of paintings did he have in mind?

Although wall paintings made for architectural decoration are our primary evidence of actual landscapes Philostratus (born c. 190 AD) describes landscape paintings from a Neopolitan gallery in his work, Eikones (Images).

You can read more on ancient landscape art in a limited preview section of A World History of Art by Hugh Honour & John Fleming.

More on Ancient Art

I found this little bonus in my travels and thought you might enjoy reading an article on New Finds at Pompeii from a January 6, 1882 article in the New York Times.

No history of landscape painting is complete without an article on Chinese Landscape Painting, which is an art unto itself and has a history and language of its own.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has created an excellent page on its Timeline of Art History on Landscape Painting in Chinese Art. There you will find an in depth, well referenced article describing work from the 7th - 20th century. The illustration for this module by Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Splashed-color Landscape (1965) is borrowed from that site.

When Beth Meckes was a sophmore at Penn State Lehigh Valley, she posted her honors term paper on Chinese Landscape Paintings of the Southern School on the web for all of us to enjoy.

If you are interested in reading a beautiful book about the Chinese approach to landscape painting, I highly recommend The Tao of Chinese Landscape Painting, Principals & Methods by Wucius Wong. New York: Design Press. 1991. An excerpt from that book can be found online.

I recently discovered Shih-T'ao and encourage landscape (and other) painters to read his Enlightening Remarks on Painting. The Berger Foundation has made available online part of Richard E. Strassman's monograph on that work.

Books on Chinese Landscape Painting include Michael Sullivan's Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China, Chinese Landscape Painting by Sherman Lee, and The Art of Chinese Landscape Painting: In the Caves of Tun-Huang by Anil de Silva and Dominique Darbois.

Interested in trying your hand at this art? See Audrey Quigley's Chinese Landscape Painting for Beginners: A Practical Course

Considering that all of the books I've cited in this module are out of print, I would say that it's about time for a new book on the subject to be written and published!

The Medieval landscape was filled with weird and wonderful images of nature rife with rich symbolism. One of my most favorite images in Medieval painting is the hand of god reaching down out of the clouds. In certain paintings, there even appear to be flying saucers. Even with great scholarship, it is difficult, if at all possible, for our modern minds to comprehend fully how the actual and interpreted landscape was truly perceived over a thousand years ago.

The icon of St. John the Evangelist pictured at the top of this module is from the Dionysiou Monastery and dates to the 11th century.

Wikipedia has a good, brief article featuring images and links on Medieval painting.

With certain painters and pieces of art, the Medieval World gives way to the Renaissance. Considering landscape, these certain painters include Giotto di Bodone with his fabulous rocks in The Miracle of the Spring and the more naturalistic setting in Preaching to the Birds, and Simone Martini with, for example, his theatrical landscape backdrop of Guido Riccio da Fogliano.

Because of the remarkable depiction of landscape, the Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry by the Limbourg Brothers is often cited as a marker in the development of landscape painting. Other Books of Hours also feature notable landscapes.

A well-written article on Landscapes in Italian Renaissance succinctly describes issues of the Medieval perception of landscape and how those issues developed.

In college, I wrote an extensive compare and contrast paper on the Simone Martini and van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece Annunciations. I am fond of Annunciation paintings and enjoyed the process but had no idea what that exercise was really preparing me for.

I took the train up from Brussels to Ghent in '97 to visit a director friend who was judging at the Ghent Film Festival. While there, I ran around town, taking in the sights. I saw a sign for the Ghent Altarpiece and ducked into St. Bavo Cathedral for a look. Honestly, I could still be standing there to this day.

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432, is the most magnificent piece of artwork I have ever beheld. It is absolute magic. It helped that I was familiar with the images - I was grateful to have already grasped the general form. Most of us have looked at reproductions of a painting and then seen the actual painting; of course, it's a different experience. Standing before The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was light years beyond anything I could have grasped from a photograph. To describe it would be to describe the light in Venice or the Grand Canyon as the sun rises and sets. What sets this work beyond imagination is that it is not the natural world in motion, it's a painting.

Based on his examination of earlier landscape miniatures in the Hours of Turin evidenced to be by the hand of Hubert van Eyck, because of the inscription on the altarpiece that attributes most of the work to Hubert, and by comparing the subsequent work of Jan van Eyck, Kenneth Clark concludes that Hubert van Eyck painted the landscapes in the altarpiece. Regardless of evidence and maybe because so many of both van Eyck brothers work has been lost, who painted what, and did Hubert even exist is, apparently, an issue for art historians. Even in the Büttner Landscape Painting: A History, only Hubert's brother Jan van Eyck is credited for the entire Ghent Altarpiece.

But Büttner does say that

"After Jan van Eyck, naturalistic landscape would be a predictable feature of depictions of Christian subject matter in the Burgundian Netherlands, and emphasis on landscape features virtually a trademark of Netherlandish narrative pictures."

Those places you're supposed to go see before you die? Familiarize yourself with the images and a bit on the background of the Ghent Altarpiece then get yourself to Ghent, go into St. Bavo's and place yourself before this masterpiece.

A wonderful site has been constructed to take you comprehensively through the altarpiece at mysticlamb.net.

St. Bavo Cathedral is open to the public. Follow that link to see visiting hours and succinct information on the panels and history.

The Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror was painted by Bellini in 1515 and is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Look at the charming and beautiful flora and fauna in the landscape of Pisanello's The Vision of Saint Eustace (c. 1435) and then see what happens after the van Eyck brothers produce their Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

In the Netherlands and Germany, the painted landscape expands in depth and detail providing vast settings for religious figures such as The Miraculous Draft of Fishes (1444) by Konrad Witz, Crucifixion (1491) by Hans Memling (although a far better example of Memling's landscape is his Seven Joys of Mary (1480), it's only available as an online link in a small, black and white version), John the Baptist in the Wilderness (c. 1484) by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, which you can compare to the oh, so unique Hieronymus Bosch version of the same subject, John the Baptist in the Wilderness, (c. 1505).

In Italy, too, the painted landscape becomes more realistic and moves deep into the distance for staging not only religious and mythological figures like Antonio del Pollaiullo's Hercules and the Hydra (1475), Raphael's Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1504-1506), and Giovanni Bellini's Saint Francis in the Wilderness (c. 1485), but also for portraits as in Piero della Francesca's Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro (1465-66) and Leonardo's Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo (the Mona Lisa!) 1503-1506.

Albrecht Dürer
View of Arco, 1495
Watercolour and gouache on paper
Louvre, Paris, France

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Joachim Patinir (1480-1524) and Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538) each took landscape painting into new territory. Dürer examined the grain of sand, Patinir and Altdorfer, the world at large. Let's begin with the grain of sand.

Nils Büttner writes about Dürer's contact with the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

"When Albrecht Dürer visited the Netherlands in 1521 he paid extra to have the retable opened so he could study its center panel."

Kenneth Clark writes about Dürer and his importance in the development of landscape art in The Landscape of Fact. Why paraphrase when Clark knows so much and writes so beautifully?

"The curiosity about the precise character of a particular spot, which was a part of the general curiosity of the fifteenth century, culminated in the topographical water-colours of Dürer. They begin in 1494 with some drawings which, in their earnest desire to give every available fact, are almost like the work of a Sunday painter. But a few months later Dürer produced the water-colour of Innsbruck, now in the Albertina, which is not only the first portrait of a town, but shows a delicate perception of light. The drawings of the Casle of Innsbruck done at the same time are pure topography, and are more remarkable for curiosity and dexterity than for those qualities which we nowadays call aesthetic. Yet this curiosity, by its intense concentration, has a compelling effect. 'He holds us with his glittering eye.' We move through the olive grove, and scale to the summit of Arco, led on by the force of Dürer's unfaltering hand. This drawing was done on the way back from Venice in the spring of 1495 and is the first of a series of water-colours which not only show Dürer's phenomenal skill, but are timeless. In his figure drawings he mastered, almost too completely, the idiom of the time. In his landscapes he is the master of all styles and subjects, from rocks, like Cezanne's quarry, to visions of poetical solitude that strangely anticipate the sentiment of the nineteenth century."

A good page of Dürer watercolors shows examples of Clark's references. You can click on the images to enlarge them a bit. One thing to remember with these pieces is that the medium and technique of watercolor was relatively new.

Grace Glueck writes a bit about Dürer's landscapes in her 2006 New York Times article The Etching Revolution: Masterpieces in Circulation.

Dürer considered Patinir to be the master of landscape painting. Olga's Gallery features a page of Patenier paintings including Charon.

Altdorfer's best known painting is The Battle of Alexander at Issus, with its large cast of extras. The Web Gallery has several good pages of his paintings categorized by landscapes, paintings of religious subject matter, altarpieces, graphics although, landscapes can be seen throughout the different categories.

It's not difficult to see the influences when later in the 16th century, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-1569) produces his masterworks of peasant life on the great, round curve of the earth and her changing seasons.

The Web Gallery of Art is an excellent source of images with fine pages on Dürer, Patinier, Altdorfer and the Brueghels but because their system allows only some direct external links to individual pages, it's best to go to their main index page, find and select specific artists for yourself.

Rembrandt van Rijn,
A Bend in the Amstel at Kostverloren, c.1650
The Duke of Devonshire and the Trustees of the
Chatsworth Settlement, Chatsworth

The University of Glasgow has an extensive page on Dutch Landscape painting in the 16th and 17th centuries. Included are Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegels the elder to whom I referred in Groundbreakers, and Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607), Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651), Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630), Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682).

You can view a collection of Rembrandt (1606-1669) landscape paintings and landscape drawings at a site dedicated to cataloging his entire works.

There are several excellent books on Dutch landscape drawings during this period. Curis O. Baer's Landscape Drawings (one of my most well-worn books) is a weighty tome that includes many fine examples of Dutch work and his Seventeenth Century Dutch Landscape Drawings is completely dedicated to them. Unfortunately, both of these books are out of print though you can find used copies. Dover Publications has a very affordable book of Rembrandt Landscape Drawings.

Wikipedia's page on The Golden Age of Dutch Painting sets the landscapes into context and the page on the Dutch Golden Age that paints the bigger picture.

Francis Towne
The Source of the Arveyron, 1781
Watercolor, pen and brown ink
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

As I was wondering how to frame and compile the many artists, extensive work and changing approaches to landscape painting in the 18th century, I found two of the most thoroughly researched, beautifully written and illustrated pages at Handprint, one of my most favorite sites on the web.

Bruce MacEvoy continues to create a beautiful and thorough site that is the end all and be all for everyone who works with watercolor. In addition to the best resource on watercolor materials and books, Bruce has written articles on an extensive list of watercolor artists.

I am turning the microphone over to Mr. MacEvoy for this module because he covers almost everything that is important in landscape development during the 18th century, with internal, illustrated links to the artists, including Claude Lorrain, Canaletto, Gainsborough, Francis Towne, Constable, Turner, and Cotman, in Poetic Landscapes and its companion Topographical Landscapes.

I was especially delighted to read his in-depth description of Alexander Cozens who's revolutionary approach to landscape painting was tremendously influential.

Many thanks to Bruce MacEvoy for these excellent articles.

The Sublime is an aesthetic philosophy that can be traced to the 1st century treatise On the Sublime but was extensively developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in England, most notably by Edmund Burke, in Germany by Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel, and in France by Victor Hugo.

I am giving the Sublime its own module because this philosophy has had a profound influence on Landscape Painting and is especially significant in the truly revolutionary, successful and influential work of J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and The American Sublime. Project Gutenberg has made available for download the catalogue for The American Sublime exhibit.

In landscape painting, the sublime is described in vast landscapes with exceptional lighting, sometimes with a human figure juxtaposed against an expansive setting.

Once you grasp the idea of the sublime in Landscape Painting, you'll begin to see the idea expressed by various artists more or less throughout history but especially in the work of particular artists. I've mentioned a few of the artists most identified with the philosophy but, to my mind, the philosophy goes hand in hand with the best experiences of landscape painting on both sides of the easel.

Hiroshige
Fujieda, c. 1845
No. 23 from "Fifty-three stations of the Tôkaidô"

Not long after merchant ships began to visit in the mid-ninteenth century, Emperor Meiji began the modernization of Japan by opening his country to international trade. One of the Japanese exports were prints and paintings from the Ukiyo-e or the "floating world" a style of art characterized by flat areas of bold color with no perspective and little shadow.

Once these paintings and prints were seen in Europe, the craze of Japonism lit style like wildfire and the look of Western painting was forever changed.

Easily recognizable influence of the Ukiyo-e on the Continent is seen in the work of Van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne (amongst others) and then in American painters like William Merrit Chase. Naturally, this influence crept into artists' landscape paintings in obvious and more subtle ways (although I can't think of one Cassatt landscape and Toulouse-Lautrec considered landscape merely an accessory to the human form). By the time the European and American artists demonstrated influence by the Ukiyo-e in their landscapes, they had incorporated the principles of the floating world into the development of their own styles.

But Patricia Flynn at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute explains the influence better and more thoroughly in her enlightening article Visions of People: The Influences of Japanese Prints-Ukiyo-e Upon Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century French Art.

Hans Olof Johansson in Sweden created a remarkably comprehensive site on Ukiyo-e including an extensive list of links.

J. Noel Chiappa at the MIT Advanced Network Architecture Group has assembled a glossary of terms for different aspects of Japanese prints including supplemental information all of which is very helpful in understanding type, size, makeup and historic context of the work.

The Cloud, 1896
Prince Eugen
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

One day, as I was randomly pulling books off the library shelf, I noticed Torsten Gunnarsson's Nordic Landscape Painting in Nineteenth Century. I took it home and have been renewing and re-checking it out ever since. I think it's time for me to buy my own copy! This is my most favorite book on landscape painting. Except for Carl Larsson, I was not at all familiar with any of the Nordic painters. I am now and urge you to find examples of and learn about this remarkable body of work.

As Gunnarrson writes in his introduction, Nature was a strong force in the less populated Nordic region and even with exposure to European work, the unique influence of the Nordic landscape on the regional painters is remarkable.

I'll give you links to my favorite painters - what links there are. As a watercolorist, I've long been familiar with and fond of Carl Larsson's (Swedish, 1853-1919) work and will never grow tired of his charm and technique. But what a mind opener to see the work of J.C. Dahl (Norwegian, 1788-1857), Gustaf Rydberg (Swedish, 1835-1933, Carl Fredrik Hill (Swedish, 1849-1911), Fanny Churberg (Finnish, 1845-1892), Kitty Kielland (Norwegian, 1843-1914), Karl Nordström (Swedish, 1855-1923), Per Eckström (Danish, 1844-1935), Harald Sohlberg (Norwegian, 1869-1935), Wilhelm Hammershøi (Danish, 1864-1916), and the marvelous Prince Eugen (Swedish 1865-1947).

My greatest surprise were the paintings of August Strindberg! I immediately bought the book by Olle Granath, August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer which served as a catalogue for the 2005 Tate exhibit of Strindberg's photographs and paintings. What's no surprise is that, as a painter, writer, photographer and musician myself (Strindberg played the guitar), I felt a deep affinity for his work. Besides that, his landscape paintings are simply awesome and eons ahead of what his contemporaries were up to.

In 2007, The Minneapolis Institue of the Arts hosted a touring exhibit, A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910 providing a comprehensive online catalogue.

Another great resource is the online catalogue of Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr. Danish Art Collection where you can find many fine examples of Danish landscapes including some by Hammershøi.

Last, but certainly not least are the sites, loaded with images for Norwegian Women Painters: 1893 Exposition including paintings of Kitty Kielland, and Swedish Women Painters: 1893 Exposition.

Edgar Degas
Landscape 9
1892 c.

Photography, impressionism and en plein air.

coming soon....

All text in this Landscape into Art Squidoo lens is written by Suzanne McDermott ©2008 Suzanne McDermott (All Rights Reserved) and may not be used without express, written permission.

Copyright is held for all links from these articles by their respective authors.