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           Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes. The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered English in the early 17th century, purely as a term for works of art; the word is not found used of real vistas before 1725.[1]
[edit] HistoryThe earliest forms of art around the world depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on human and animal figures rather than the landscape setting. For a real sense of landscape, some rough system of perspective is needed, and this seems from literary evidence to have first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. We have rather more survivals from Ancient Roman art, from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescoes of landscapes decorating rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii, Herculaneum and elsewhere, and mosaics. The Chinese ink painting tradition of shan shui, or "pure" landscape, in which any minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the viewer to participate in the experience, arose in the 5th century CE, and was well established by the time the oldest surviving ink paintings were executed. Both the Roman and Chinese traditions often show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, often involving spectacular mountain scenery - in China often with waterfalls and in Rome often including sea, lakes or rivers. These were frequently used, as in the example illustrated, to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista, a persistent problem for landscape artists. The Chinese style generally showed only a distant view, or used dead ground or mist to avoid that difficulty. In early Western medieval art interest in landscape disappears almost entirely, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works such as the Utrecht Psalter; the last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space.[2] A revival in interest in nature initially mainly manifested itself in depictions of small gardens such as the Hortus Conclusus or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescos of figures at work or play in front of a background of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject.[3] Several frescos of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.[4] Early in the fifteenth century, landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert. Luxury illuminated manuscripts were very important in the early development of landscape, especially series of the Labours of the Months such as those in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which conventionally showed small genre figures in increasingly large landscape settings. A particular advance is shown in the less well-known Turin-Milan Hours, now largely destroyed by fire, whose developments were reflected in Early Netherlandish painting for the rest of the century. The artist known as "Hand G", probably one of the Van Eyck brothers, was especially successful in effects of light and in a natural-seeming progression from the foreground to the distant view.[5] This was something other artists were to find difficult for a century or more, often solving the problem by showing a landscape background from over the top of a parapet or window-sill, often as from a considerable height.[6] Landscape backgrounds for various types of painting became increasingly prominent and skilful during the century. The period around the end of the 15th century saw pure landscape drawings and watercolours from Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolomeo and others, but pure landscape subjects in painting and printmaking, still small, were first produced by Albrecht Altdorfer and others of the German Danube School in the early 16th century. At the same time Joachim Patinir in the Netherlands developed a style of panoramic landscapes with a high aerial viewpoint that remained influential for a century, being used by Pieter Brueghel the Elder for example. The Italian development of a thorough system of graphical perspective was now known all over Europe, which allowed large and complex views to be painted very effectively. Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw an explosion of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. There are different styles and periods, and sub-genres of marine and animal painting. Italian and French landscapes still most often wanted to keep their classification within the hierarchy of genres as history painting by including small figures to represent a scene from classical mythology or the Bible, as in the works of Claude Lorrain. Most Dutch landscapes were relatively small, but landscapes in Flemish Baroque painting, still usually peopled, were often very large, above all in the series of great works that Peter Paul Rubens painted for his own houses. The popularity of landscapes in the Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigous place in 19th century art than ever before. In England landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter's rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a bouyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems in the books of Alexander Cozens and others. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits. The German Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style drawing on the Dutch 17th century had developed. French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would be the most influential in Europe for a century, and in the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time make landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting. In Europe, as John Ruskin realized,[7] and Sir Kenneth Clark brought to view, landscape painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant art", with the result that in the following period people were "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity"[8] In Clark's analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches: by the acceptance of descriptive symbols, by curiosity about the facts of nature, by the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature and by the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved. The nationalism of the new United Provinces had been a factor in the popularity of Dutch 17th century landscape painting and in the 19th century, as other nations attempted to develop distinctive national schools of painting, the attempt to express the special nature of the landscape of the homeland is a general tendency. In Russia, as in America, the gigantic size of paintings was itself a nationalist statement. In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late nineteenth century, is probably the best known native development in landscape art. These painters created works of mammoth scale in attempting to capture the epic scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, has much in common with the philosophical ideals of European landscape paintings — a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works which placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of romantic exaggeration, to be sure) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature. The best examples of Canadian landscape art can be found in the works of the Group of Seven, prominent in the 1920s.[9] [edit] Related -scapes
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