Landscape painting, using the simplest of definitions, is the depiction of natural scenery in art. These paintings may capture mountains, valleys, bodies of water, fields, forests, and coasts and may or may not include manmade structures, as well as people. Although paintings from the earliest ancient and classical periods included natural scenic elements, landscapes as an independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition until the Renaissance in the 16th century.

Landscape painting in the 16th,17th, and 18th centuries was still not a genre in its own right and was considered low in the art academy's rigid hierarchy of subject matter. Even so, background landscapes became increasingly detailed in compositions that emerged in Venice in the late 15th century.

The center of landscape painting during the 18th century Rococo period shifted from Italy and the Netherlands to England and France.  French painters developed lyrical and romantic outdoor scenes that, with precise detail and delicate coloring, glorified nature.

By the 19th century, landscape painters had embraced the wide-reaching Romantic movement and infused their compositions with passion and drama. It was in this period that landscape painting finally emerged as a respectable genre within the art academies of Europe and gained a strong following in the United States.

In the United States, the Hudson River school painters were centered in the Hudson River valley, New York. In paintings of the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River, and the wilderness of New England and beyond, these artists captured the 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.

Beginning in Europe, the Impressionists, a movement of the late 19th century, moved away from romanticism and realistic renderings, favoring a more subjective form of expression. Artists such as Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and 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 color was ground breaking and influenced generations of artist.

The 20th century saw a continued interest in nontraditional approaches to painting the landscape. From about 1898 to 1906 in France, the Fauvists applied brilliant colors directly from their tubes of paint onto the canvas, often leaving parts of the canvas exposed. They, like the Impressionists before them, painted from nature, but they emphasized the two-dimensionality of their surface and used color as a mode of expression rather than as the tool with which to capture atmospheric effects and the elements of nature.

The 1920s saw the rise of Surrealism in Paris and artists like Dalí, Magritte, and Miró, delved into the subconscious for subject matter. The Surrealist landscape depicted a strange tableaux of fantasy and myth set in a semi-natural world which featured unexpected juxtapositions between the natural and the imagined world.

Ok, all this art history sounds great, but these are modern times…why do we need the landscape painting today?  We can just use our cell phones and take pictures of nature just as well.  Why do we need paintings of those subjects?

Well, if this abbreviated history tells us anything about the landscape painting, it tells us that such work is an enduring, important, even vital part of the art world and therefore of our world.  For so many, there seems to be a passé attitude towards the landscape as just something to be seen in museums or in pretentious homes reaking of the old world charms; but how wrong this is.  For the landscape painter reminds us that we are all descended from a time when glass, metal and concrete edifices were not to be found in our world.  Nature, and for many that term is associated with the devine, was supreme.  And when we fill our homes with wonderful works of landscapes, whether ancient, modern or even futuristic in style, we pay tribute to this belief.  That is, that nature still reigns supreme, if we only take the time to open our eyes and behold it.  And no, a selfie standing in front of the Grand Canyon just won't suffice.  If you don't believe me, just feast your eyes on this painting of the Grand Canyon by Thomas Moran, 1872.   Enjoy...

Garcia & Co.

fine art consulting group