Landscape
Related: art - capriccio - pastoral - sublime - picturesque - primitive
Artists: Salvator Rosa - Claude Lorrain
Pastoral Landscape with a Flight into Egypt (1663) - Claude Lorrain
Image sourced here.
From William Gilpin's Picturesque Landscape in Three Essays, 1792.
The Great Wave Off Kanagawa - Hokusai, Katsushika, From "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"; 1823-29 (140 Kb); Color woodcut, 10 x 15 in; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Key work of art: Spiral Jetty (1970) - Robert Smithson
An early example of land art.
Definition
Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers and forests. Sky is almost always included in the piece, and weather is a facet of the composition.
In the 1st century, Roman frescoes of landscapes decorate rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap (the German cognate is 'landschaft) meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the later 17th century.
Early in the 15th century landscape painting was established as an art genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert.
The Chinese tradition of "pure" landscape, in which the minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the viewer to participate in the experience, was well established by the time the oldest surviving ink paintings were executed. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_painting [Oct 2005]
Other 'scapes
Cloudscapes or skyscapes are depictions of clouds, weatherforms, and atmospheric conditions in the same manner as landscapes.
Seascapes depict oceans or beaches in the same manner as landscapes.
The Polar Sea (1824) - Caspar David Friedrich
The Polar Sea (1824) - Caspar David Friedrich
image sourced here. [Jul 2005]
Sublime
During the 19th century, in both European and American art, the landscape emerged as a subject of profound significance. As industry flourished, many artists turned to nature as an escape. --http://wwar.com/masters/f/friedrich-caspar_david.html [Jul 2005]
Capriccio
Capriccio with the Colosseum (1743-44) - B. Bellotto
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