Art de peinture de paysage

La peinture de paysage, la représentation des paysages naturels dans l'art. Les peintures de paysages peuvent capturer des montagnes, des vallées, des plans d'eau, des champs, des forêts et des côtes et peuvent ou non comprendre des structures artificielles ainsi que des personnes. Bien que les peintures des premières périodes anciennes et classiques comprenaient des éléments scéniques naturels, le paysage en tant que genre indépendant n'est apparu dans la tradition occidentale qu'à la Renaissance au XVIe siècle. Dans la tradition orientale, le genre remonte à la Chine du IVe siècle.

L'article suivant ne traite que de la tradition occidentale. Pour plus d'informations sur d'autres traditions de peinture de paysage, recherchez par pays ou région - par exemple, peinture chinoise, art japonais, arts d'Asie du Sud: arts visuels.

Peinture de paysage aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Bien que la peinture de paysage ne soit pas encore un genre à part entière et soit considérée comme faible dans la hiérarchie rigide des sujets de l'académie d'art, les paysages de fond sont devenus de plus en plus détaillés dans les compositions qui ont émergé à Venise à la fin du XVe siècle. Les paysages étaient remarquables dans les œuvres de Giovanni Bellini (L'agonie dans le jardin, ch. 1465; Saint Jérôme lisant dans un paysage, ch. 1480–1485) et, un peu plus tard, dans celles de Giorgione (The Tempest, ch. 1505; Adoration des bergers, 1505/10). Au milieu du XVIe siècle, des artistes du nord de l'Europe - en particulier ceux de l'école du Danube, tels que Joachim Patinir et Albrecht Altdorfer - créaient des peintures qui, bien que souvent peuplées de figures bibliques, célébraient véritablement la beauté de la nature à part entière. Plus tard au 16e siècle,L'artiste flamand Pieter Bruegel the Elder est devenu un maître peintre paysagiste, spécialisé dans les vues panoramiques colorées et très détaillées (Paysage avec la chute d'Icare, ch.1558; Hunters in the Snow, 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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