Landscape gardens garden,
Wiltshire, England in
Wuxi (1506–1521) The
Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. It includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the Imperial Family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection and escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature. A typical Chinese garden is enclosed by walls and includes one or more ponds,
scholar's rocks, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings. The
English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the 'English garden', is a style of parkland garden intended to look as though it might be a natural landscape, although it may be very extensively re-arranged. It emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical
jardin à la française of the 17th century as the principal style for large parks and gardens in Europe. The English garden (and later
French landscape garden) presented an idealized view of nature. It drew inspiration from paintings of landscapes by
Claude Lorrain and
Nicolas Poussin, and from the classic
Chinese gardens of the East, and the philosophy of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778). The English garden usually included a lake, sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, and recreations of classical temples, Gothic ruins, bridges, and other picturesque architecture, designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape. The work of
Lancelot "Capability" Brown and
Humphry Repton was particularly influential. By the end of the 18th century the English garden was being imitated by the French landscape garden, and as far away as St. Petersburg, Russia, in
Pavlovsk, the gardens of the future
Emperor Paul. It also had a major influence on the form of the
public parks and gardens which appeared around the world in the 19th century.
Landscape architecture ,
New York City, US, designed by
Frederick Law Olmsted.
Landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of
botany,
horticulture, the
fine arts,
architecture,
industrial design,
geology and the
earth sciences,
environmental psychology,
geography, and
ecology. The activities of a landscape architect can range from the creation of public parks and parkways to site planning for campuses and corporate office parks, from the design of residential estates to the design of civil
infrastructure and the management of large
wilderness areas or
reclamation of degraded landscapes such as mines or
landfills. Landscape architects work on all types of structures and external space – large or small,
urban,
suburban and
rural, and with "hard" (built) and "soft" (planted) materials, while paying attention to ecological
sustainability. For the period before 1800, the history of landscape gardening (later called landscape architecture) is largely that of master planning and
garden design for
manor houses,
palaces and royal properties, religious complexes, and centers of government. An example is the extensive work by
André Le Nôtre at
Vaux-le-Vicomte and at the
Palace of Versailles for King
Louis XIV of France. The first person to write of making a landscape was
Joseph Addison in 1712. The term landscape architecture was invented by
Gilbert Laing Meason in 1828 and was first used as a professional title by
Frederick Law Olmsted in 1863. During the latter 19th century, the term
landscape architect became used by professional people who designed landscapes.
Frederick Law Olmsted used the term 'landscape architecture' as a profession for the first time when designing
Central Park,
New York City, US. Here the combination of traditional landscape gardening and the emerging field of city planning gave landscape architecture its unique focus. This use of the term landscape architect became established after
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and others founded the
American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1899.
Landscape and literature The earliest landscape literature language group's mythical being,
Damarri, transformed into a mountain range, is seen lying on his back above the
Barron River Gorge, looking upwards to the skies, within north-east Australia's wet tropical forested landscape Possibly the earliest landscape literature is found in
Australian aboriginal myths (also known as
Dreamtime or Dreaming stories,
songlines, or Aboriginal
oral literature), the stories
traditionally performed by
Aboriginal peoples within each of the
language groups across Australia. All such myths variously tell significant truths within each Aboriginal group's local
landscape. They effectively layer the whole of the Australian continent's topography with cultural nuance and deeper meaning, and empower selected audiences with the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of Australian Aboriginal ancestors back to
time immemorial. In the
West pastoral poetry represent the earliest form of landscape literature, though this literary genre presents an idealized landscape peopled by shepherds and shepherdesses, and creates "an image of a peaceful uncorrupted existence; a kind of
prelapsarian world". The pastoral has its origins in the works of the Greek poet
Theocritus (c. 316 - c. 260 BC). The
Romantic period poet
William Wordsworth created a modern, more realistic form of pastoral with
Michael, A Pastoral Poem (1800). An early form of landscape poetry,
Shanshui poetry, developed in China during the third and fourth centuries A.D. , the main setting for
Thomas Hardy's novel ''
Tess of the d'Urbervilles''.
Hambledon Hill towards
Stourton Tower Topographical poetry Topographical poetry is a
genre of poetry that describes, and often praises, a landscape or place.
John Denham's 1642 poem "Cooper's Hill" established the genre, which peaked in popularity in 18th-century England. Examples of
topographical verse date, however, to the
Late Classical period, and can be found throughout the
Medieval era and during the
Renaissance. Though the earliest examples come mostly from continental Europe, the topographical poetry in the tradition originating with Denham concerns itself with the classics, and many of the various types of topographical verse, such as river, ruin, or hilltop poems were established by the early 17th century.
Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest" (1713) and
John Dyer's "
Grongar Hill' (1762) are two other familiar examples.
George Crabbe, the
Suffolk regional poet, also wrote topographical poems, as did
William Wordsworth, of which
Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey is an obvious example. More recently,
Matthew Arnold's "
The Scholar Gipsy" (1853) praises the
Oxfordshire countryside, and
W. H. Auden's "
In Praise of Limestone" (1948) uses a
limestone landscape as an allegory. Subgenres of topographical poetry include the
country house poem, written in 17th-century England to compliment a wealthy patron, and the
prospect poem, describing the view from a distance or a temporal view into the future, with the sense of opportunity or expectation. When understood broadly as landscape poetry and when assessed from its establishment to the present, topographical poetry can take on many formal situations and types of places. Kenneth Baker, in his "Introduction to
The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry, identifies 37 varieties and compiles poems from the 16th through the 20th centuries—from
Edmund Spenser to
Sylvia Plath—correspondent to each type, from "Walks and Surveys", to "Mountains, Hills, and the View from Above", to "Violation of Nature and the Landscape", to "Spirits and Ghosts." Common aesthetic registers of which topographical poetry makes use include
pastoral imagery, the
sublime, and the
picturesque, which include images of rivers, ruins, moonlight, birdsong, and clouds, peasants, mountains, caves, and waterscapes. Though describing a landscape or scenery, topographical poetry often, at least implicitly, addresses a political issue or the meaning of
nationality in some way. The description of the landscape therefore becomes a poetic vehicle for a political message. For example, in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill", the speaker discusses the merits of the recently executed
Charles I.
The Romantic era in Britain One important aspect of British
Romanticism – evident in painting and literature as well as in politics and philosophy – was a change in the way people perceived and valued the landscape. In particular, after
William Gilpin's
Observations on the River Wye was published in 1770, the idea of the
picturesque began to influence artists and viewers. Gilpin advocated approaching the landscape "by the rules of picturesque beauty," which emphasized contrast and variety.
Edmund Burke's
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was also an influential text, as was
Longinus'
On the Sublime (early A.D., Greece), which was translated into English from the French in 1739. From the 18th century, a taste for the sublime in the natural landscape emerged alongside the idea of the sublime in language; that is elevated rhetoric or speech. A topographical poem that influenced the Romantics, was
James Thomson's
The Seasons (1726–30). The changing landscape, brought about by the
industrial and
agricultural revolutions, with the expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influences on the growth of the
Romantic movement in Britain. The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts, and the pollution of the environment all led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialisation and a new emphasis on the beauty and value of
nature and landscape. However, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment, as well a reaction against the scientific
rationalisation of nature. The poet
William Wordsworth was a major contributor to the literature of landscape, as was his contemporary poet and novelist
Walter Scott. Scott's influence was felt throughout Europe, as well as on major
Victorian novelists in Britain, such as
Emily Brontë,
Mrs Gaskell,
George Eliot, and
Thomas Hardy, as well as
John Cowper Powys in the 20th-century.
Margaret Drabble in ''A Writer's Britain'' suggests that Thomas Hardy "is perhaps the greatest writer of rural life and landscape" in English.
Europe Among European writers influenced by Scott were Frenchmen
Honoré de Balzac and
Alexandre Dumas and Italian
Alessandro Manzoni. Manzoni's famous novel
The Betrothed was inspired by
Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe.
North America Also influenced by Romanticism's approach to landscape was the American novelist
Fenimore Cooper, who was admired by
Victor Hugo and Balzac and characterized as the "American
Scott."
China Landscape in
Chinese poetry has often been closely tied to Chinese landscape painting, which developed much earlier than in the West. Many poems evoke specific paintings, and some are written in more empty areas of the scroll itself. Many painters also wrote poetry, especially in the
scholar-official or literati tradition. Landscape images were present in the early
Shijing and the
Chuci, but in later poetry the emphasis changed, as in painting to the
Shan shui ( lit. "mountain-water") style featuring wild mountains, rivers and lakes, rather than landscape as a setting for a human presence. and left most of the varied landscapes of China largely unrepresented.
Shan shui painting and poetry shows imaginary landscapes, though with features typical of some parts of South China; they remain popular to the present day.
Fields and Gardens poetry (), in
poetry was a contrasting poetic movement which lasted for centuries, with a focused on the nature found in gardens, in backyards, and in the cultivated countryside. Fields and Gardens poetry is one of many
Classical Chinese poetry genres. One of the main practitioners of the Fields and Gardens poetry genre was Tao Yuanming (also known as
Tao Qian (365–427), among other names or versions of names). Tao Yuanming has been regarded as the first great poet associated with the Fields and Gardens poetry genre.
Landscape art Landscape photography Many landscape photographs show little or no human activity and are created in the pursuit of a pure, unsullied depiction of
nature devoid of human influence, instead featuring subjects such as strongly defined landforms, weather, and ambient light. As with most forms of art, the definition of a landscape photograph is broad, and may include urban settings, industrial areas, and
nature photography. Notable landscape photographers include
Ansel Adams,
Galen Rowell,
Edward Weston,
Ben Heine, Mark Gray and
Fred Judge.
Landscape painting , "View of Deventer" (1657). The earliest forms of art around the world depict little that could really be called
landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included. The earliest "pure landscapes" with no human figures are
frescos from
Minoan Greece of around 1500 BCE. Hunting scenes, especially those set in the enclosed vista of the reed beds of the
Nile Delta from Ancient Egypt, can give a strong sense of place, but the emphasis is on individual plant forms and human and animal figures rather than the overall landscape setting. For a coherent depiction of a whole landscape, some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance, is needed, and this seems from literary evidence to have first been developed in
Ancient Greece in the
Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive. More
ancient Roman landscapes survive, from the 1st century BCE onwards, especially frescos of landscapes decorating rooms that have been preserved at archaeological sites of
Pompeii,
Herculaneum and elsewhere, and
mosaics. The Chinese
ink painting tradition of
shan shui ("mountain-water"), or "pure" landscape, in which the only sign of human life is usually a sage, or a glimpse of his hut, uses sophisticated landscape backgrounds to figure subjects, and landscape art of this period retains a classic and much-imitated status within the Chinese tradition. Both the Roman and Chinese traditions typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains – in China often with waterfalls and in Rome often including sea, lakes or rivers. These were frequently used to bridge the gap between a foreground scene with figures and a distant panoramic vista, a persistent problem for landscape artists. A major contrast between landscape painting in the West and East Asia has been that while in the West until the 19th century it occupied a low position in the accepted
hierarchy of genres, in East Asia the classic Chinese mountain-water ink painting was traditionally the most prestigious form of visual art. However, in the West, history painting came to require an extensive landscape background where appropriate, so the theory did not entirely work against the development of landscape painting – for several centuries landscapes were regularly promoted to the status of history painting by the addition of small figures to make a narrative scene, typically religious or mythological.
Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century saw the dramatic growth of landscape painting, in which many artists specialized, and the development of extremely subtle realist techniques for depicting light and weather. The popularity of landscapes in the
Netherlands was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious painting in a
Calvinist society, and the decline of religious painting in the 18th and 19th centuries all over Europe combined with
Romanticism to give landscapes a much greater and more prestigious place in 19th-century art than they had assumed before. In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited the site. The English tradition was founded by
Anthony van Dyck and other, mostly
Flemish, artists working in England. By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of
Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of
John Constable,
J. M. W. Turner and
Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits. "The Course of Empire The Arcadian or Pastoral State", US, 1836. , ''
Lac de l'Eychauda'', France, 1886,
Museum of Grenoble. In Europe, as
John Ruskin said, and
Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant art", with the result that in the following period people were "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity" The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. The German
Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his
Danish training. To this he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism. French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the
Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the
Impressionists and
Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting. In the
United States, the
Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late 19th century, is probably the best-known native development in landscape art. These painters created works of mammoth scale that attempted to capture the epic scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of
Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, has much in common with the philosophical ideals of European landscape paintings — a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as
Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature. The best examples of Canadian landscape art can be found in the works of the
Group of Seven, prominent in the 1920s.
Emily Carr was also closely associated with the Group of Seven, though was never an official member. Although certainly less dominant in the period after World War I, many significant artists still painted landscapes in the wide variety of styles exemplified by
Neil Welliver,
Alex Katz,
Milton Avery,
Peter Doig,
Andrew Wyeth,
David Hockney and
Sidney Nolan. The term
neo-romanticism is applied in British art history, to a loosely affiliated school of landscape painting that emerged around 1930 and continued until the early 1950s. These painters looked back to 19th-century artists such as
William Blake and
Samuel Palmer, but were also influenced by French cubist and post-cubist artists such as
Pablo Picasso,
André Masson, and
Pavel Tchelitchew. This movement was motivated in part as a response to the threat of invasion during World War II. Artists particularly associated with the initiation of this movement included
Paul Nash,
John Piper,
Henry Moore,
Ivon Hitchens, and especially
Graham Sutherland. A younger generation included
John Minton,
Michael Ayrton,
John Craxton,
Keith Vaughan,
Robert Colquhoun, and
Robert MacBryde. ==Gallery of landscape paintings from different periods==