American Landscape Painting History

During the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, Landscape painting appeared as a distinct genre, as religious art fell out of favor in a Protestant society.

For more detailed information about the history of the American landscape, we spoke with the landscape painter, Albert Serino.

Albert Serino dedicates to landscape painting since the early 90’s. His paintings, which have been presented to some of the most popular galleries in the USA and Canada, combine his long-standing interest in landscape, still life and portraiture.

Albert draws inspiration by art historical traditions as diverse as Chinese landscape painting, Surrealism and Folk Art.

He shared that in Europe, landscapes evolved from backgrounds in portraits of wealthy landowners to a prestigious art form embraced by Romantic painters. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these painters invested the natural world with allegorical and mythic significance in reaction to scientific advances of the Enlightenment.

The American Art was firstly dominated by landscape painting in the early part of the 19th century. Idealized images of a vast, a belief in its boundless prospects was deeply interwoven with its natural environment, and an unspoiled wilderness that reflected a nation whose identity, were introduced.

As the experienced landscape painter, Albert Serino further explains, landscape artists chronicled the disappearing wilderness and the expanding presence of modern civilization in the paintings, as the American frontier was pushed further westward. This paintings glorified industrial development for their patrons or served as reminders of the price of progress.

Works of mammoth scale were created by the painters of Hudson River School that attempted to capture the epic scope of the American landscape that favored contemplation of natural beauty. Works that placed a greater emphasis on the raw, terrifying power of nature, were created by other Hudson River School artists including Albert Bierstadt.

In the 1870s, the paintings of Thomas Moran of the Yellowstone River helped to persuade Congress to set aside the Yellowstone area as a national park.

The experienced landscape painter, Serino points out that the themes of urbanization and a yearning for the tranquility of pristine natural spaces began to replace romantic views of nature, by the dawn of the 20th century.

A group of New York artists led by Robert Henri, called the “Ashcan School” or Urban Realists, in the 1920s, focused on gritty urban scenes.

As it has been further explained by Serino, portraits that glorified the labor and lifestyle of agrarian rural America, were created by The Regionalist Painters during the 1930s. The Regionalist Painters is a group, of artists working primarily in the Midwest. Some of the members of this group include Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry as well as lesser-knowns like Marvin Cone.

The landscape has been approached with a variety of strategies by modern American artists, such as Serino. These strategies were influenced by European art movements such as abstract expressionism and cubism. In the artworks of Serino this influence can be also felt.

The American painter Charles Burchfield in the 1963 has stated: “An artist must paint, not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols”.