SESSION 19 Landscapes 1400 - 2000 (Monday 6th April & Tuesday 3rd March)
1. Joachim Patinir 2.1 Landscape with the Flight into Egypt 1516 oil on panel, (17 × 21cm) Museum of Fine Arts Belgium 2. Albrecht Aldorfer 2.1. Landscape with a Footbridge 1518-20 Oil on vellum (41X35cm) National Gallery 2.2. Landscape of Danube near Regensburg, c 1528 (30.5 X 8.7cm) Alte Pinakothek Munich 3. El Greco 3.1. View of Toledo 1598 Oil on canvas MMA, New York(121 X 108cm) 4. Pieter Breugel the Elder 4.1. The Harvesters 1565 Oil on wood(119 X 162 cm) MMA, New York 5. Aelbert Cuyp 5.1. Herdsmen with Cows 1645 Oil on canvas (39 X 57 cm) Dulwich Art Gallery 6. Jacob van Ruisdael 6.1. Wheat Fields c1670 Oil on canvas (100 X 130cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art 7. Claude Lorrain 7.1. Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia 1682 Oil on canvas Ashmolean Museum 8. Richard Wilson 8.1. Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idrris 1774 Oil on canvas (511cm X73 cm) Tate Britain 9. Constable 9.1. View of the Stour near Dedham 1822 Oil on canvas (51 X 74in) Huntingdon Library CA 9.2. Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, oil on canvas, (56 X101cm) NGA Washington 10. Turner 10.1. Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm 1836(92 X 123 cm) Chicago 11. Théodore Rousseau 11.1. The Descent of Cows from the High Plateaus of the Jura 11.2. Wooded Landscape with a Faggot Gatherer. Private collection 12. John Linnell 12.1. Wheat c1860 Oil on canvas (94 X 140cm) National Gallery of Victoria 13. Erich Heckel 13.1. Lake near Moritzburg 1905 Oil on canvas (60 X 70cm) National Museum Cardiff 14. Paul Nash 14.1. Event on the Downs 1934 Oil on canvas (51 X 61cm) Government Art Collection 14.2. Kimmeridge Folly 1937 15. Graham Sutherland 15.1. Welsh Landscape with Roads 1936 Oil on canvas (61 X 91cm) Tate 16. Eric Ravilious 16.1. Train Landscape 1939 Aberdeen Art Gallery 17. Ivan Hitchens 17.1. The Curved Barn 1922 Oil on canvas Pallant House Gallery 17.2. A River Pool 1957 Oil on canvas Nottingham City Museums 18. David Hockney 18.1. Woldgate Woods (300 cm wide) 2006
Landscapes play such a dominate part in painting today it may be worthwhile remembering how they arrived late as independent genre only in the 16th century and have had a lowly status for most of the time since then. While earlier paintings included the natural world as setting for human activity, I take landscape to be a painting where any human figures are insignificant in relation to that setting. Dutch artists should be credited with establishing its popularity, but it may be the one area where British painters have made a significant contribution to European art.
Joachim Patinir's immense vistas, such as the Flight into Egypt, combine observation of naturalistic detail with lyrical fantasy. The steep outcrops of rocks are more spectacular versions of local Flemish formations; these became a part of the world landscape formula of other artists along with his colour scheme (brown foreground, blue-green middle distance, pale blue distant). His landscapes use a high viewpoint with a high horizon.
Albrecht Altdorfer is credited with producing the first pure landscapes in European art. He is regarded as a member of the Danube School (along with Lucas Cranach & others) that set biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds. Around 1511 he travelled to the Alps and avoided human figures in his art – people should participate and imitate nature. Landscape with Footbridge may be the first oil landscape painting; the firs are given anthropomorphic stylisation of “limbs”.
El Greco in View of Toledo may also be making a comment on spirituality. He was prepared to ‘relocate’ buildings to create the effects desired; in the same way as many 20th Century artists, he didn’t want to tell us what the city looked like but what if felt like. The Council of Trent had banned landscapes; the painting might tell us something about the nature of God and the psychological conflicts we experience.
In Northern Europe humanist ideas held much more sway, and freed from the demand for religious themes an artist like Peter Bruegel could explore secular subjects. The label as a peasant painter is misplaced, we now believe he was a well-travelled town dweller painting for other urban residents. The Harvesters is in part a portrayal of the cycle of rural life, but I think the meticulous detail of its panorama can justify its inclusion as a landscape painting.
The Dutch Golden Age artists often relied on selling completed works rather than commissions and landscapes were a very popular genre. Dutch citizens were proud of their nascent independence and often believed God’s providence had given them a fruitful land – some of which had been ‘created’ from their efforts and skill at drainage. Jacob van Ruisdael frequently painted fertile fields of grain and Wheat Fields is typical The figures are small and the drama of the scene comes mainly from the cumulus clouds. As in many Dutch paintings we catch a glimpse of the sea on the far left.
Some have argued that Claude Lorrain may have had a medical condition that caused him to elongate his figures in but that may trivialise their importance in our understanding to Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia. They are dominated by the power of natural world and the ancient ruins – they are interlopers in a world in ancient ‘giants’ and nature. Claude’s influence on nineteenth century British landscapes artists might be hard to exaggerate.
Ruskin credited Richard Wilson as being the father of British landscape painting, yet he has been largely ignored in recent times. Wilson searched for the sublime in Welsh landscapes, (Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idrris) and maybe was the first major artist to focus on these bleak areas. I think it was not just art that was transformed, Wilson and the Romantics changed our view of what was beautiful (picturesque) in the world.
It can be argued that the idealised classical landscapes of artists such as Claude and Poussin may have been the incentive to create the parklands and follies of 18th century English estates. Constable still felt it necessary to rearrange the features of Wivenhoe Park to improve the vista by including both the house and lake. In a time of industrialised change the artist can create a timeless landscape; the eleven year old Mary Rebow will forever drive her donkey cart across her father’s estate.
Turner was not so sentimental about the past; he frequently chose to illustrate the dramatic both in the weather and technology. In his trip to Northern Italy in 1836 he may well have experienced poor weather but one suspects he may not have witnessed anything to match that in Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm.
The Barbizon School of French landscape artists were inspired by Constable by painting his sketches en plein air. One who immersed himself was Théodore Rousseau, living and working in the Barbizon area, directly observing and recording the area and elevating the status, in France, of landscape painting. Always willing to innovate, The Descent of Cows from the High Plateaus of the Jura has an unusual vertical orientation.He was sometimes criticised for the ‘unfinished’ quality of his paintings; perhaps, the modern viewer is more willing to accept the painterly quality of Wooded Landscape with a Faggot Gatherer.
John Linnell was one of England’s most prolific and popular landscape artists; Wheat, like much Victorian landscape painting, it is the result of myopic nostalgia for a rural idyll that ignored agricultural depressions and encroachments from industry or suburbia.
In 1905, Erich Heckel was a co-founder of Die Brücke (The Bridge), the first Expressionist group, noted for their use of strident colours. Lake near Moritzburg dates from the summer of 1909 when Heckel was painting with his friend Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in the lakeland around the Saxon royal hunting lodge of Moritzburg, north of Dresden.
Ivon Hitchens early work such as The Curved Barn was influenced by the writings of the critic Clive Bell: ’ What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?’. The answer, according to Bell, is ‘significant form’ which he goes on to loosely describe as: ‘lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, that stir our aesthetic emotions’. More typical of Hitchens’ later work is A River Pool, where the features of landscape have become almost abstract.
To promote its petrol, during the 1920s and 1930s, Shell produced a range of posters; two of the famous artists involved were Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, and I’ve included a couple of posters. Paul Nash was a war artist in both world wars, and exhibited alongside the Surrealists. In Event on the Downs the incongruous tennis ball is an equivalent of the yin-yang symbol representing the masculine and feminine aspects of ourselves; at death the parts separate so the masculine rises into the sky (the cloud) and the feminine sinks into the earth(the tree stump).
Graham Sutherland may have temporarily fallen out of fashion but I’m sure his strong emotional response to landscape is perennial. In Welsh Landscape with Roads there may be an dramatic element of threat from the dark colours and the small man dwarfed by nature, The ancient past is evoked by the animal skull and standing stones.
Eric Ravilious was a war artist whose career was cut short when his plane was lost off Iceland in 1942 aged 39. Train Landscape neatly combines the modern interior of a railway carriage and the ancient history of the downs of Southern England. Recently it was discovered his wife skilfully pasted a painting by him of the Westbury Horse over the original Wilmington Man.
David Hockney knew Woldgate Wood from his childhood. The very large scale may change the relationship of viewer to the landscape – are we drawn into being part of the image? His use of the iPad may be modern and permit a Fauvist use of colour but, for me, the paintings seem to lack emotional content, and I wonder how (Art) History will judge them. But what do I know!
© Patrick Imrie 2020