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This re-opens a debate that has simmered ever since the invention of the camera: if a machine can  reproduce a likeness why bother with art and individual artists?  The difference here is that the end result of the robot Rubens' efforts has the erratic creative lines that we associate with creativity.  But it is actually the result of a £300 program that with a bit of attention could create a less "artistic looking" and more "exact" result.  Questions abound...

What is the difference between a machine that creates a drawing with erratic lines that look like what we've come to associate with a free-spirited artist and the real thing?  But also: what is the difference between this particular robot and a photocopier with someone placing their private parts on top of it (or any other part of their anatomy)?  Or a camera?

Not that much I would say to the second question.  Photo-editing software can also turn any photo into something that looks like a textured painting made with  palette knife. But that doesn't necessarily let artists breathe more easily in response to the first question.  

What gives the current robot ("worker" in its original Slavic meaning) it's publicity value is it's erratic/creative use of lines, which ever since the invention of photography has delineated artists from "mechanical" photography.

Apart from Rembrandt's sketches and etchings in the 17th Century, we have to wait until after the invention of photography before artists started to use "inexact" lines to distinguish themselves from the new all-conquering camera.  But then of course soon after photographers started to manipulate their shots to create startling results and get away from faithful renderings of reality.  Photography became creative and joined the arts.... All very confusing....

Whilst my work is currently largely hand-made (and I love that) I am not dismissive of mass reproduction and technology aided creativity. I've been particularly impressed with what can be done with programs like Photoshop on screen.  All of this is an interaction with and blurring of the boundary between man and machine, which is fine by me.  What maybe Paul Tresset's Rubens Robot achieves is a lowering of the man-created distinction between "repetitive machine" and "artistic genius", and that may not be a bad thing.

But returning for now to the more familiar story, there is a lot more happening before the Impressionists came along, and they certainly had their groundwork done for them before their first show of independents.  Turner, already mentioned is a true one-off and so is Friedrich, but Constable also did radical work with a free brush stroke that pre-empts what was to follow. The school of Barbizon (Th. Rousseau, Millet, Courbet) is well-known, as are Jongkind and Corot.

What was radical about the Impressionists (Pisarro, Monet, Morisot) was that they went solo, they bypassed the conventional way of being shown and recognised, and eventually pulled it off.  This independence and stubbornness in its turn led to a flowering of such different styles that it actually a misnomer to talk about the Impressionists as a style. How different can it get? Monet and Pisarro, Seurat and Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir and Degas: their styles are so different, and that is where the real significance lies.  As a group they were soon overtaken by new movements for who they had opened the door.

It is worthwhile noting that despite their current popularity with the Impressionists also starts the separation between a large section of the public and modern art.  This was made possible by both artists' stubbornness, the will to do their own thing, and the growing diversifying urban market.  That didn't stop van Gogh from hardly selling a painting during his life.

With the post-impressionists individual radicalism and experimentation reach a peak (van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin) and colour explodes helped by new paints created by new chemistry. But again I'm impressed by the other movements that split off at the same time: the symbolists and art nouveau artists (Redon, Klimt) and the first noted "naieves" (Rousseau).

Early 20th century we then see an explosion of styles and movements (the Fauves, the colourists, Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Constructivists et al).  The old art history has depicted these as a movement towards ever greater abstraction, but this is now generally seen as flawed.  Basically on the continent anything goes from the early 20th Cy onwards, with Britain and the US lagging some 20 years behind.  There are streams and influences running right through the age and any artist can choose what they wish to do and who they feel affinity with.  There are clearly families of thought, for example conceptual art is hugely indebted to Dada, and self-taught naives like Wallis have opened up opportunities for many who followed.

I'm not even going to try and name landscape artists that followed or where they fit in. Some show cubist influences, others return to a super realism or a magical realism.  The field is just to wide to capture.

One last point I would like to make however is that with the advent of Modern Art (capital letters!) a second split was created other than that between the general public and the new art movements: the distinction between art and illustration, generally with an implied hierarchy of the former being of a higher order.  But when we realise that the last century's linear story of art was never real in the first place, it makes it easier to see that the format of illustration is another creative outlet for outlets, and the work created, often in mass media, is as worthy of attention as individual works hanging on gallery walls or in whichever modern format.  I'm often taken aback by the quality of work created just to illustrate a one-off news paper article in a weekend magazine.  Artistic diversity in a diverse market is the order of the day, and that's how it should be.

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)