Landscape painting

Landscape painting, or landscape art, shows natural scenery like mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, and forests, especially when the main focus is a broad view arranged into a balanced composition. In some works, landscape backgrounds for figures still play a key role. The sky is almost always part of the scene, and weather often shapes the composition. Detailed landscapes as a separate subject don’t appear in every artistic tradition; they emerge only when a culture already has a refined tradition of depicting other subjects. Two major traditions come from Western painting and Chinese art, each going back over a thousand years. In East Asian art, a spiritual element in landscape was recognized from the start, influenced by Daoism and other philosophies, but in the West, this idea only became clear with Romanticism. Landscape views can be entirely imaginary or copied from reality with varying accuracy. If a picture’s main goal is to show a real, specific place—especially with prominent buildings—it’s called a topographical view. Such views, very common as prints in the West, are often seen as less important than fine art landscapes, though the line isn’t always clear. Similar biases existed in Chinese art, where literati painting usually showed imaginary scenes, while professional artists painted real ones. The word “landscape” entered modern English as *landskip* (spelled various ways), an anglicization of the Dutch *landschap*, around the early 1600s, first used for a work of art in 1598. Within a few decades, it described vistas in poetry, and later real views. However, the related Old English word *landscaef* or *landskipe* for a cleared patch of land existed earlier, though it’s not recorded in Middle English. **History**

The earliest art worldwide shows little that could truly be called landscape, though ground-lines and hints of mountains, trees, or other natural features appear. The earliest “pure landscapes” without human figures are Minoan frescoes from around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes from Ancient Egypt, set in the reed beds of the Nile Delta, give a strong sense of place, but focus on individual plants and figures rather than the overall setting. The frescoes from the Tomb of Nebamun (c. 1350 BCE) are a famous example. For a coherent depiction of a whole landscape, some rough system of perspective or scaling for distance is needed. Literary evidence suggests this first developed in Ancient Greece during the Hellenistic period, though no large-scale examples survive. More ancient Roman landscapes survive from the 1st century BCE onward, especially frescoes decorating rooms at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere, along with mosaics. The Chinese ink painting tradition of *shan shui* (“mountain-water”), or “pure” landscape, where the only sign of human life is usually a sage or his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds for figures. Landscape art from this period remains classic and much-imitated in the Chinese tradition. Both Roman and Chinese traditions typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, backed by spectacular mountains—in China often with waterfalls, and in Rome often including sea, lakes, or rivers. These were frequently used to bridge the gap between a foreground with figures and a distant vista, a persistent problem for landscape artists. The Chinese style usually showed only a distant view, or used dead ground or mist to avoid this difficulty. A major contrast between Western and East Asian landscape painting is that in the West, until the 19th century, it held a low position in the accepted hierarchy of genres, while in East Asia, classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most prestigious form of visual art. Aesthetic theories in both regions gave highest status to works requiring the most imagination. In the West, this was history painting; in East Asia, it was the imaginary landscape, where famous practitioners were, at least in theory, amateur literati, including several emperors of China and Japan. They were often also poets whose lines and images illustrated each other. However, in the West, history painting came to need an extensive landscape background where appropriate, so the theory didn’t entirely work against landscape painting—for several centuries, landscapes were regularly promoted to history painting by adding small figures to create a narrative scene, usually religious or mythological. **Western tradition**

**Medieval** In early Western medieval art, interest in landscape almost completely disappears, kept alive only in copies of Late Antique works like the Utrecht Psalter. The last reworking of this source, in an early Gothic version, reduces the previously extensive landscapes to a few trees filling gaps in the composition, with no sense of overall space. A revival in interest in nature initially mainly appeared in depictions of small gardens like the *Hortus Conclusus* or those in millefleur tapestries. The frescoes of figures at work or play in front of dense trees in the Palace of the Popes, Avignon, are probably a unique survival of what was a common subject. Several frescoes of gardens have survived from Roman houses like the Villa of Livia.