Today is Earth Day! Besides actually sitting outside and enjoying nature, what is the next best way to appreciate the natural world around us? That's right! Landscapes.
Within landscapes there is not only amazing natural scenes but emotion and a spiritual element. The added spiritual elements in landscape started in East Asian art with Daoism, and in then the West there was Romanticism. Where landscapes (with no added spiritual element) started with frescos in Greece and hunting trips depicted in Egypt.
Romanticism is the type of landscapes that we think of when we think of the stereotypical landscape. There were many prolific Romantic landscapes artists: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Frederic Edwin Church, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Thomas Cole, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and many MANY more. In the 19th Century romantic landscapes were prominent in Dutch and American tradition of painting where they would have special schools devoted to learning about a genre of art like the Hudson River School. It started with a craze for landscape painting with the Dutch in the 17th Century with Realism but it really caught on in the 19th Century again starting with the Dutch. Quickly American artists jumped on the romantic landscape bandwagon to show off their new frontier which was different from the European atmosphere art enthusiasts were used to.
Let's look at how not only the composition of these pieces create great strength and pride but also include an emotional feeling attached, either through the weather or the colors and brushstrokes.
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| Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859, Hudson River School |
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| Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, German Romanticism |
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| John Constable, Stonnehenge, 1836, Victoria and Albert Museum London |
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner, Wreckers Coast of Northumberland, 1836, Yaler Center for British Art |
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| Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836, Metropoliatan Museum of Art New York |
Now in East Asian Art, landscape is considered their most valuable contribution to the art world. They didn't have a mad craze for landscape, instead landscape was deep within their culture and was spread out over many centuries. William Watson wrote that "It has been said that the role of landscape art in Chinese painting corresponds to that of the nude in the west, as a theme unvarying in itself but made the vehicle of infinite nuances of vision and feeling." A lot of East Asian landscapes are monochrome which is attributed to Wang Wei's paintings where he devoided the use of figures and shifted to monochrome style of painting. The Song Dynasty Southern School has some of the highest regarded landscape paintings. There is a shan shui tradition where the landscapes were never intended to represent real locations even if they were named after them.
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| Song Xu, Landscape After Wang Wei's Wangchuan Picture, 1574, Ming Dynasty |
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| Tang Yin, A Fisher in Autumn, 1523, China |
There is so much more in the history of landscape and how it evolved in every culture around the globe. There are many books of the topic and papers written about artists who were devoted to the landscape. So, if you are interested you should check it out!
