Landscapes
Land, water and sky as the main subject of a picture, across Chinese, European and modern traditions.
2,348 works · 10 related artists
About
Landscape painting makes land, water and sky the subject, not the backdrop. Chinese painters had raised it to the highest genre by the 11th century, and Fan Kuan's Travellers among Mountains and Streams (c. 1000) sets a tiny mule train beneath a towering cliff. In Europe, the garden room from the villa of Livia at Prima Porta (c. 30–20 BC) wraps its walls in painted trees and birds, but the independent landscape picture came much later, in works such as Albrecht Altdorfer's Landscape with a Footbridge (c. 1518–20), which has no story at all.
The 17th century divided the field between Claude Lorrain's golden, idealised Italy and Jacob van Ruisdael's weathered Dutch trees and skies. John Constable gave working English countryside grand scale in The Hay Wain (1821), and Paul Cézanne rebuilt Mont Sainte-Victoire from blocks of colour. David Hockney painted Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) across fifty canvases.
