LANDSCAPE PAINTING

wanderer above the sea of fog

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Landscape paintings place an emphasis on the grand scale of nature. When humans are depicted in these works, it is only as a tiny part of the vast and eternal, natural world. This art style became popular in the West through the Romantic tradition.

Romanticism was a prominent movement in Europe that arose in the late 18th century as a counter-movement to the Enlightenment's values of order and logic. Artists of the Romantic Era often depicted scenes highlighting the rich beauty of the untamed wilderness. The German Sturm und Drang movement was especially important, which preferred intuition and emotion over rationalism. There was a strong recourse in the heroic, natural and inevitable - a zeitgeist in the representation of ideas. Artist Caspar David Freidrich summarized the movement best when he said, "the artist's feeling is his law."

Particularly important in Romantic, Landscape works is the effect of nature upon the artist, when he is surrounded by it and preferably alone.

It is important to note that the Romantic Movement emerged after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In opposition to the destruction of the natural world, many artists latched onto the beauty and power of the natural world.

Below we include more information on some noteworthy Landscape Artists in this movement as well as a depiction of some of their works.

GERMAN PAINTERS

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, 1830-35

Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German, Romantic landscape painter, and is generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his landscape works which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension."

Rather than just providing pretty pictures of nature, he sought to provide a sublime experience - a spiritual experience, gained through the contemplation of nature. Freidrich is said to have been instrumental in the depiction of landscape as full of Romantic feeling. In addition to depicting a wide array of geological features, such as rock coasts, forests and mountains, his work also expresses a sense of religious mysticism, the inevitability of death, and elements of Germanic folklore.

Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him."

LINKS ON CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808)

The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1808

The Complete Works

Artcyclopedia

Wikipedia

NORWEGIAN PAINTERS

JOHAN CHRISTIAN DAHL

shipwreck

Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway, 1832

Johan Christian Claussen Dahl (February 24, 1788 – October 14, 1857), who is often known as J. C. Dahl or I. C. Dahl, was an artist who is considered the first great romantic painter in Norway and the founder of the "golden age" of Norwegian painting. As one critic has put it, "J.C. Dahl occupies a central position in Norwegian artistic life of the first half of the 19th century.

Although Dahl spent much of his life outside of Norway, his love for his country is very clear in the themes he chose for his paintings, as well as in his extraordinary efforts towards Norwegian culture in general. Even with his monumental artistic creations set aside, his other activities on behalf of art, history, and culture would still have guaranteed him a place at the very heart of the artistic and cultural history of Norway. He was a key figure in the founding of the Norwegian National Gallery as well as in the preservation of Norwegian stave churches and the restoration of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim and Håkonshallen in Bergen.

According to Dahl, nature was his greatest teacher. In 1812 he wrote to Sagen stating that he was studying "nature above all." As an artist of the landscape tradition, he was as faithful as possible to nature itself. Dahl believed that landscape painting should not just depict a specific view, but should say something about the land's character: the greatness of its past, and the life of its inhabitants. The mood of his paintings was often idyllic and melancholy.

LINKS ON JOHAN CHRISTIAN DAHL

Johan Christian Dahl - View of Dresden by Moonlight.

View of Dresden by Moonlight, 1838

Dahl Artworks

Dahl on Artcyclopedia

Wikipedia

THEODOR KITTELSEN

Op under Fjeldet toner en Lur, 1900 (Up in the Hills a Clarion Call rings out)

Theodor Severin Kittelsen (27 April 1857 – 21 January 1914) is one of the most popular artists in Norway. Kittelsen became famous for his nature paintings, as well as for bringing Norwegian folklore to life in his vivid pictures of fairy tales, legends and trolls. Kittelsen's style can be classified somewhere between Neo-Romantic and Naive Painting.

Black metal and folk metal bands such as Burzum, Otyg and Satyricon have drawn inspiration from his art and used some of his paintings in album covers.

AMERICAN PAINTERS

Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a key figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. Church was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School and the only pupil of Thomas Cole, the school's founder. The Hudson River School was established by the British Thomas Cole when he moved to America and started painting landscapes which depicted traditional American life and the country's natural beauty. Like most second generation painters of the Hudson River School, Church used extraordinary detail, romanticism and luminism in his paintings. Luminism refers to an emphasis on light. The Hudsom River School tradition carries on in the work of Church, who painted idealized, uninterrupted visions of the natural world. The emphasis on nature is encouraged by the low horizontal lines and vast open skies.

Church is best known for painting large panoramic landscapes, which often depicted mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Yet he is also known for his work showcasing the dramatic, natural phenomena that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America. In his later years, Church painted classical Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scenes and city scapes.

Although Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was born in Germany, he is best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In order to paint these scenes, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century. He also was part of the Hudson River School. In addition to painting scenes of nature, he is noteworthy for capturing a scene from the American Civil War in his Guerilla Warfare 1862, as well as in his portrayals of Native American life.

His work on the geysers and picturesque topography of Yellowstone were instrumental in convincing the U.S Congress to pass the Yellow Stone Park bill in 1872, thus establishing the first national park in the world. Afterwards, Congress purchased a large painting from Bierstadt for $10,000. As a result of the publicity generated by his Yellowstone paintings, Bierstadt's presence was requested by every explorer considering a westward expedition.