Nature & Landscape

Nature and landscape have been depicted in art since antiquity, from Minoan frescoes around 1500 BCE and Roman garden paintings at Pompeii to the sophisticated shan shui ("mountain-water") tradition of Tang and Song dynasty China, where painters like Wang Wei and Fan Kuan treated landscape as a vehicle for Daoist spiritual contemplation rather than mere topography. In the West, landscape all but vanished as an independent subject during the medieval period, surviving only as background in religious scenes, before being revived by Giotto and later elaborated in Netherlandish "world landscapes" and the illuminated calendar pages of manuscripts like the Très Riches Heures. The Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century established landscape as a specialized, market-driven genre in its own right, prized for its subtle rendering of light, weather, and atmosphere, while Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin elevated landscape's status in France by embedding it within classical and biblical narrative. Romanticism transformed landscape into a vehicle for the sublime and the spiritual: Caspar David Friedrich's solitary wanderers before vast vistas and J.M.W. Turner's dissolving light effects reframed nature as an emotional and even terrifying force. The 19th century saw landscape become, in critics' words, "the dominant art" of the era, propelled by the Barbizon School in France, the nationalist grandeur of America's Hudson River School, and finally the Impressionists' revolutionary plein-air technique, enabled by the invention of the collapsible paint tube. Into the 20th and 21st centuries, artists from Georgia O'Keeffe to David Hockney continued reinventing landscape through abstraction, ecological concern, and new media, cementing nature as one of art history's most enduring and continuously reinvented subjects.