Arta picturii peisajului

Pictura peisajului, reprezentarea peisajului natural în artă. Picturile peisagistice pot surprinde munți, văi, corpuri de apă, câmpuri, păduri și coaste și pot include sau nu structuri create de om, precum și oameni. Deși picturile din cele mai vechi perioade antice și clasice includeau elemente pitorești naturale, peisajul ca gen independent nu a apărut în tradiția occidentală până la Renașterea din secolul al XVI-lea. În tradiția estică, genul poate fi urmărit din China secolului al IV-lea.

Articolul următor tratează doar tradiția occidentală. Pentru informații suplimentare despre alte tradiții de pictură peisagistică, căutați după țară sau regiune - de exemplu, pictură chineză, artă japoneză, arte din Asia de Sud: arte vizuale.

Pictura peisagistică în secolele XVI, XVII și XVIII

Deși pictura peisajului nu era încă un gen în sine și era considerată scăzută în ierarhia rigidă a academiei de artă a subiectelor, peisajele de fundal deveneau din ce în ce mai detaliate în compozițiile apărute la Veneția la sfârșitul secolului XV. Peisajele au fost notabile în lucrările lui Giovanni Bellini (Agonia în grădină, c. 1465; Saint Jerome Reading in a Landscape, c. 1480–85) și, puțin mai târziu, în cele ale lui Giorgione (The Tempest, c. 1505; Adorația dintre păstori, 1505/10). La mijlocul secolului al XVI-lea, artiști din nordul Europei - în special cei din școala Dunării, precum Joachim Patinir și Albrecht Altdorfer - au creat picturi care, deși adesea populate cu figuri biblice, au sărbătorit cu adevărat frumusețea naturii în sine. Mai târziu în secolul al XVI-lea,Artistul flamand Pieter Bruegel cel Bătrân a devenit un pictor de peisaj maestru, specializându-se în vederi pitorești colorate, foarte detaliate (Peisaj cu căderea lui Icarus, c. 1558; Vânători în zăpadă, 1565; The Harvesters, 1565).

The 17th century ushered in the classical, or ideal, landscape, which set scenes in the mythic and idyllic Arcadia of ancient Greece. The leading practitioners of the classical landscape were the French-born Italy-based artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. With their idyllic scenes and classically ordered, harmonious compositions, Poussin and Claude attempted to elevate the reputation of the landscape genre in a variety of ways: by attaching metaphorical meaning to the natural elements of their paintings, by depicting mythological or biblical stories set in elaborate natural settings, and by emphasizing the heroic power of nature over humanity.

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The other prominent landscape tradition of the 17th century emerged from the Netherlands in the work of Dutch artists Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and Meindert Hobbema. The sky, often ominously cloudy and filling half or more of the canvas, played a central role in setting the tone of a scene. The Dutch artists of that period infused the elements of their compositions with metaphorical meaning and made use of the visual impact of small figures in a vast landscape to express ideas on humanity and its relationship to almighty nature.

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The centre of landscape painting during the 18th-century Rococo period shifted from Italy and the Netherlands to England and France. French painters Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher developed lyrical and romantic outdoor scenes that, with precise detail and delicate colouring, glorified nature. Their lighthearted landscapes—called fêtes galantes—were decorative vignettes filled with beautifully dressed men and women enjoying outdoor amusements and leisure time. The English Rococo landscape tradition was led by Richard Wilson, who painted in Italy as well as in his native England. His best-known painting, Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle (c. 1765), which shows a group of three people fishing at a lake framed by mountains, exemplifies his serene style. Other English landscape painters of note include Thomas Girtin, John Robert Cozens, and Thomas Gainsborough (who was also well known for his portraiture).

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The Romantic landscape and the first half of the 19th century

Landscape artists of the 19th century embraced the wide-reaching Romantic movement and infused their compositions with passion and drama. It was in the 19th century that landscape painting finally emerged as a respectable genre within the art academies of Europe and gained a strong following in the United States as well. In England two of the foremost landscape painters were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Both artists worked on a grand scale to express the power of nature. They were both masters at capturing on canvas the atmospheric qualities of the weather. Constable, however, worked in a realist mode with a high level of precision in his landscapes of the English countryside, whereas Turner, particularly later in his career, produced wildly expressionistic and atmospheric seascapes that verged on abstraction.

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In Germany the Romantic landscape was epitomized in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings were charged with emotional and religious symbolism and could be interpreted allegorically. Friedrich’s The Cross in the Mountains (c. 1808)—a painting of a crucifix illuminated by the sun’s rays at the summit of mountain—expresses a spiritual sentiment by way of the natural elements. French artists Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau, and others were part of the Barbizon school (1830s–70s), a group that painted in and around the Fontainebleau forest. The artists, though only loosely tied to one another, were united in their interest in capturing carefully observed nature. They eschewed the formal balanced compositions of their predecessors in preference for a truer, if less harmonious, depiction of their surroundings.

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In the United States the Hudson River school (1825–70) painters were centred in the Hudson River valley in New York. In paintings of the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River, and the wilderness of New England and beyond, the artists captured dramatic effects of light and shade, the finest details of their subject matter, and celebrated the unique beauty of still-untouched areas of the American landscape. The group’s first members—Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Doughty—inspired numerous younger painters including Frederic Edwin Church, Fitz Henry Lane, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade. The invention of the tin tube for paint (1841) and the invention of the portable collapsible easel (also in the mid-19th century) revolutionized the landscape genre by allowing artists to venture out of the studio and study and paint their subjects firsthand. Outdoor painting became the dominant practice of the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century.

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