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Seventeenth Century
Despite the number and high quality of
landscape paintings during the sixteenth century, view painting did not
really come into it's own until the seventeenth century with the rise
of the Dutch and Flemish schools: including artists such as Rembrandt,
Jacob Van Ruisdael and Rubens.
The French artist, the Rome-based Nicolas
Poussin was another influential contributor to the genre, as was the
popular artist Claude-Lorrain whose paintings (eg. Landscape with the
Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1648) comprised exquisite pastoral landscapes
as the settings for religious themes.
Before entering the eighteenth century,
it's worth emphasizing that the real distinction between landscape as
ornament and landscape as an automous genre, is not the presence of absence
of human figures, but rather their size and function. When foreground
figures take up most of the picture surface the landscape is mere background,
which is why Leonardo da Vinci, despite his interest in landscape, did
not produce true landscape paintings. In true landscape painting, human
figures - whether dispersed or foreground - exist merely to indicate scale
and evoke the viewers empathy.
Eighteenth Century Landscape Art
Landscape painting in the eighteenth century
continued to develop in response to the general social and political climate
engered by the ancien regimes in England, France and the rest of
Europe. New attitudes to the natural environment emerged, and in England
distinctive new traditions appeared, reflecting the practice of landscape
gardening - the reordering of nature to suit aristocratic patrons. Scenic
paintings were still not regarded as ends in themselves. Rather they portrayed
the divine harmony of nature, and a calm confidence in the current climate
of prosperity.
England
Order, not drama, was the dominant motif,
in eighteenth century English landscape. This is exemplified in works
by the first major British landscape artist Richard Wilson (eg. The Destruction
of Niobe's Children, 1760), Thomas Gainsborough (eg. Mr and Mrs Andrews,
1749), William Marlowe (eg. The Pont du Gard Nimes, 1767), John Robert
Cozens (eg. London From Greenwich Hill, 1791), and by the tragic consumptive
Thomas Girtin (eg. The White House Chelsea, 1799) of whom Turner said:
"Had Tom Girtin lived, I would have starved." Girtin's artworks
ushed in the nineteenth century era of English scenic art, which witnesed
some of the greatest landscapes ever produced.
Europe
In France, Jean-Antoine Watteau combined
beautiful scenery with outdoor conviviality (fete galantes), while artists
like Jean-Honore Fragonard produced frothy foliage and clouds (eg. The
Swing, 1767). In Italy, Giovanni Panini was a highly successful contemplative
landscape artist (eg. Ruins with Figures), being a contemporary of Giovanni
Canaletto, the acclaimed Venetian painter, known for his precise topographical
views of Venice and its waterways. Other eighteenth century Italian landscape
masters included: Francesco Guardi (eg. Landscape with Ruins, 1775), Francesco
Zuccarelli (eg. An Italianate River Landscape), and Bernardo Bellotto
(eg. View of Warsaw from the Royal Castle, 1772).
In summary, during this period view painting
attracted growing interest from artists and patrons alike, and was becoming
a much more respected genre. Even so, the eighteenth century saw a relatively
ordered rise in landscape appreciation and practice, compared to the dramatic
artistic events of the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth Century Landscape Art
After the cataclysmic events of the French
Revolution (c.1789-93) and the Napoleonic Wars (c.1795-1815), nineteenth
century landscape art blossomed into a major pictorial genre for artists,
patrons and collectors, in an era of the greatest landscapes ever produced.
Two major traditions emerged: English and French, both of which influenced
landscape painters throughout Europe and North America and had a huge
impact on the art of the period. In Russia, the landscape genre found
its expression in the Wanderers
movement, founded in 1863.
English
Landscapes
The Norwich
School of artists (most active c.1803-1830s), founded by John Crome and
John Sell Cotman, extended the Dutch Luminist tradition and produced landscapes,
coastal and marine scenes from around Norfolk, preferring outdoor painting
to studio easel work. Then came the Suffolk artist John Constable (1776-1837)
with masterpieces like The Hay Wain (1821), portraying man and Nature
existing in perfect harmony. Its nostalgic quality (nostalgia for a departing
world of innocent rustic life) stems from the fact that agriculture was
then in depression and there were riots in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775-1851), England's greatest and most original landscape painter, had
arrived on the scene. A watercolourist
until 1796, he became in 1802 the youngest ever full member of London's
Royal Academy. In the 1800s, his scenic views became much more dramatic
and Romantic, both in their subject matter and sense of movement. This
was a totally revolutionary approach to landscape painting. He began elevating
landscape to the status of historical painting by seeding pictures with
historical actions (eg. Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, 1812)
and natural forces (eg. The Burning of The Houses of Lords and Commons,
1835). From the 1830s, his landscape and seascape art became increasingly
free, focusing primarily on atmospheric effect. By the early 1840s some
of his paintings were almost abstract in composition, dissolving into
a haze of colour and light (eg. The Dawn of Christianity). In his treatment
of colour and light, Turner anticipated Impressionism.
Turner's
dramatic artworks were in contrast to the pastoral, often religious-based,
landscapes of his contemporaries. The latter included: the German Romantic
artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), whose small-scale scenic works
(eg. Winter Landscape, 1811) were full of religious symbolism; Samuel
Palmer (1805-1881) and his intense Christian view of Nature; John Martin
(1789-1854) whose paintings included dramatic scenes from the Bible in
sweeping panoramic landscape settings; and Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the
American painter who lead what became known as the Hudson River School
whose paintings portrayed unspoilt reaches of the new continent as parables
of God's power and benevolence.
The same winds of change that helped Turner
to revolutionize English landscape art, were also sweeping over France.
In addition, new paint manufacturing techniques enabled oil paints to
be packaged in tubes, thus allowing artists to paint outdoors. This greater
ability to complete oil paintings as
well as larger works on location as it were, led to a significant increase
in plein air landscape painting in the milder French climate.
Major
Developments in 19th Century France
In nineteenth century France, the art of
plein-air landscape painting was
tranformed at the Barbizon
School, under Theodore Rousseau, which led to the new Realism
art movement introduced by Gustave
Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet,
and later to the Impressionist
landscape painting of Claude
Monet, Alfred Sisley
and Camille Pissarro.
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