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Landscape is the latest to develop of the various branches of painting. It probably cannot mature until a civilisation is sufficiently advanced for Man no longer to feel Nature as a wholly unpredictable, hostile force. The first manifestations of landscape in Europe occurred in the Pompeian frescoes. Some nine centuries later under the Sung dynasty ( A. D. 960-1279) the Chinese found a perfect expression for their pantheistic, meditative philosophy in landscape painting. The chief elements of these pictures are lakes, mountains, torrents, mists, rocks and trees, highly conventionalized, in no way attempting to reproduce an actual locality by always interpreting a definite mood of Nature.
In Europe, landscape painting has been much more closely associated with particular localities, rendered with varying degrees of realism. The desire of the Renaissance painters to recreate actual appearances inevitably led to a realistic rendering of the background behind figures of Saints and Madonnas. The backgrounds in the large figure compositions of such painters as Pollaiuolo and Francesca are astonishingly faithful renderings of the Tuscan landscape. The study of perspective developed an understanding of the importance of space and light in the painting of landscape and these qualities are emphasised in the works of Perugino and his followers.
A more personal attitude towards Nature, the beginnings of an understanding of the power of landscape to convey particular emotions, is displayed in the remarkable backgrounds of Giovanni Bellini, and to some extent in those of van Eyck. The Venetian painters, of whom Bellini was the first, did much to further the development of landscape painting. In pictures such as Titian's 'Noli me Tangere' and still more Giorgione's 'Fête Champêtre' and 'The Tempest', landscape is no longer relegated to the background, but plays an equal part with the figures in the production of the total impression.
Such paintings of figures in landscapes paved the way for the 'Landscape with Figures', of which Brueghel in the North and Claude in Italy were the notable exponents.
So long as figures played even so small a part in the composition as in 'The Tempest', they determined the design. But when they came to play quite an insignificant role, the bones of the design had to be evolved from the landscape itself. Brueghel made the landscape into a flat, decorative pattern; to Claude, on the other hand, light and atmosphere were all-important. Meanwhile in Holland an independent art of landscape was produced, whose chief merit was the sincerity with which the cool skies, the marshes, the sandy seashore, the waterways and buildings of the Dutch countryside were recorded.
With few exceptions these Dutch landscapes fall into the category of topography, rather than of true landscape. The landscapes of Rembrandt and Seghers are exceptions to this generalization. In Flanders, Rubens' great sweeping compositions were isolated achievements in the career of one whose chief business and contemporary appeal as a painter lay in quite other directions. Rubens' importance as a landscapist was not recognised until the 'Chateau de Stern' was lent by Sir George Beaumont to the British Institution in 1815.
In England by the end of the 18th century, appreciation of natural beauties was considered essential in any person claiming to be cultivated. This was specially propitious to the development of landscape painting. But Gainsborough's early Suffolk landscapes and Wilson's 'Cader Idris' had been painted long before this, and Alexander and J. R. Cozens had already produced pen and wash drawings which had more of the Chinese approach to Nature than anything so far seen in Europe. By 1815 the art had become a matter of intensive study to such painters as Crome, Constable and Turner. Constable is one of the most important figures in the history of landscape painting. He was the first to paint the colours of nature and the sparkle of light as he saw them. But his work is by no means naturalistic. It expresses far more in its intensity of feeling than the spirit of a particular locality and moment.
Constable's example was of great importance in the development of French Impressionism. The Impressionists inherited his technique, however, rather than his feeling, and were chiefly concerned with the accurate renderings of effects of light and with the formal problems of painting. Cézanne still further emphasised structural elements and created a monumental landscape art. Van Gogh used landscape as a vehicle for his own turbulent emotions with brilliant results; but his pictures were too individual to exert any but a disastrous influence on the art. Constable had little influence on English landscape painting and Turner's great achievements in romantic landscape and his astonishing rendering of effects of light were equally neglected until our own day, when his influence is apparent in the work of painters such as Donald Hamilton Fraser, Peter Kinley and William Johnstone. An interest in Cotman led to the development of one modern English school of landscapists, concerned with style and formal values, of whom Paul Nash was the most distinguished. After the Second World War there was a romantic revival among English landscape painters, the most notable of whom is Graham Sutherland.
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