History of Landscape Painting

One of the principal types or genres of subject in Western art is landscape

It has been relatively recently that nature started being appreciated for its own sake and became a specific subject of art.

Here, landscape painter Albert Serino shares some facts about landscape painting across the centuries.

Landscape was used only as a background of portraits or paintings, generally of religious, mythological or historical subjects, until the seventeenth century.

Nowadays, landscape continues to be a major theme in art. In order to explore the ways people relate to the places they live in, and to record the impact they have on the land and the environment, many artists, including Al Serino, are using documentary techniques such as video, photography and classification processes.

Landscape across the centuries

Seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin, started creating artworks in which the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects that were the supposed focus of the artworks.

As the landscape painter Serino explains, those landscapes were highly stylized and appeared artificial. Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin tried to bring to mind the classical Greece and Rome landscape. Consequently, their works became known as classical landscape.

Concurrently, a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting has being developed by Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael, based on what they saw around them.

In the seventeenth century, landscape was placed fourth in order of importance out of five genres by the French Academy. However, although the classical idea predominated, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century.

Over the nineteenth century, a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting was seen. Serino, an artist with a large portfolio of landscape paintings, shares that it seem that this was partly driven by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God, and partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialisation and urbanisation.

John Constable and J.M.W. Turner from Britain were two outstanding contributors to this phenomenon. Then, the baton passed to France. There in the hands of the impressionists, landscape painting became the vehicle for a revolution in Western painting (modern art) and the traditional hierarchy of the genres collapsed.

As the experienced artist, Al Serino, further explains, the definition of landscape was challenged over the second half of the twentieth century. This genre expanded. It began to include urban and industrial landscapes. When creating their artworks, artists began to use less traditional media.

Albert Serino gives an example: land artists such as Richard Long, in the 1960s, radically changed the relationship between landscape and art by creating artworks directly within the landscape.