Landscape painting is seen by a large part of the public as the core of art practice. The cliched image of the artist, with easel and baret, painting outside in some beauty spot seems hard-wired in our collective consciousness. Amateurs aspire to it to probably to the same extent that modern art rebels against it, and it is easy to see why. But I love landscape: walking in it, cycling in it, flying over it, opening a bottle of wine in it, and painting it.
The funny thing about landscape painting, despite the cliched image, is that it is a relatively recent addition to a the art pantheon, and gained a relatively short period of dominance (romantics and impressionists) to be now consigned to a kind of sub-status in the modern art world. They certainly won't teach it at art college, although I have noticed lots of art students returning to it after graduation....
Let me indulge you in a short tour of my favourite artists in this genre:
Sticking to western art (the Chinese were there earlier as in most things) it is hard to find landscape artists before the Renaissance, then landscape, clearly enjoyed by the artist, turns up as a backdrop mainly to mythological of religious subjects (Giorgione, Bosch, Altdorfer). To my mind Brueghel the Elder was the first however to make the landscape undeniably the subject rather than an ornament to a primary subject. In his "Hunters in the snow" and "Winter landscape with a birdtrap" the artist is clearly indulging his love for the landscape, and, quite unusual for his time, painting Northern European scenes rather than fanciful Holy Lands or Italianate views.
The development of the landscape than stays in Northern Europe with the genre for the first time gaining respectability in the Dutch Republic in the 17th Century, where a whole raft of artists supplied the rich burghers with scenery: Rembrandt did wonderful sketches and etchings; van Ruysdael, Koninck, Seghers, Cuyp and van Goyen are just a few of the artists worth mentioning. They all paint in the Northern baroque claire-obscur style of the day.
Where landscape surfaces in Southern Europe it remains mainly a backdrop to religious or mythological themes, with France offering a kind of halfway house. Noteworthy are Poussin and Lorrain (not so keen) and Watteau (I'm a fan).
It is in England though that landscape develops further, first with wholesale importation of Dutch works, then growing into an English style of its own. It's worthwhile noticing the impact of religion and class on the art of nations: to my eye the English landscape of the 18th century and early 19th Cy (Gainsborough, Constable) has a distinct Anglican feel about it compared with the more prosaic, even dour Dutch art.
Like in the Netherlands the growth of an affluent middle class allowed a growing number of artists to carve out a living outside of court and noble patronage, and this had an impact on the choice of subjects. Landscape fits in the increasingly utilitarian and rationalist outlook of the period. There is Wilson doing romantic mountain scenery in Wales (a possible source for thousands of poor imitations), and Sell Cotman and Towne being important in the development of watercolour. Other names worth mentioning are De Wint, Cox (we're well into the 19th C by now), Glover, Barker and Chrome. Some of it is a backward looking (with hindsight) but all of these artists have in common that in this Romantic era they choose landscape as a subject in itself.
One of the advantages of post-modernism in the arts is that we can now look at the 19th century as a creative and diverse period in its own right, rather than in a teleological way seeing it only as leading up to the Impressionists. As a result we can look at and admire artists like Friedrich, Turner, Daumier and so many others with fresh eyes. There is so much diversity out there, and that in many ways can be seen as a precursor to the current situation, where in my eyes, anything goes.
Illustration takes off in a big way (Dore' springs to mind), orientalism (Roberts, Johnson) and what we now think of as high Victoriana (Becker in Britain, Cole and Bierstadt in the US), but also the Prerafaelites emerge (although less relevant to this subject) and many other individual artists. The message to take from this is that lots of movements and trends were happening, a lot of them survived the onslaught of Impressionism and Postimpressionism to live another day. (to be continued)
