Western landscape painting

Landscape is one of the main genres of Western art, and Tate points out that treating nature as a subject worth painting for its own sake is a fairly recent development. Before the 1600s, scenery served only as a backdrop to portraits and to religious, mythological, and historical scenes. In the 17th century Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin began letting the setting take over such scenes, shaping a highly stylised, even artificial, vision of ancient Greece and Rome that became known as “classical landscape”; Dutch painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael developed a more naturalistic landscape drawn from the world around them. In the same century the French Royal Academy ranked landscape fourth among five genres. The 19th century brought a surge of naturalistic landscape, with John Constable and J. M. W. Turner as Britain’s outstanding names, and the National Museum of Western Art notes that Turner’s work has also been valued as an embodiment of the sublime. Next the change centred on France, where the Impressionists made landscape the vehicle of a revolution in Western painting that led to modern art, and the old ranking of genres fell apart. Since the later 20th century the genre has taken in cities and industry, and in the 1960s Richard Long and other land artists made work in the landscape itself. The Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum notes that Antonio Fontanesi, an Italian landscape painter, was invited in 1876 to teach at the Technical Fine Arts School, and that his pupils included some of Japan’s first Western-style painters.

Find the horizon and see how much of the picture is sky. Then follow where the light comes from and how it falls on the water or the ground.

• True-view landscape 진경산수→East Asian landscape painting follows a separate tradition.