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Landscapes were not always painted as subjects in their own right, nor was it always easy to make a living as a landscape painter. 15th century Netherlandish painters opened up new opportunities for painting as they developed a more realistic vision of religious events, their main patron the Church. Painters like the Master of Frankfurt in Antwerp set religious scenes against recognisably real backgrounds, which gradually became more significant for secular patrons with the coming of the Renaissance in Italy.
By the 16th century landscape was an accepted element in the multitude of pictorial images now being created, appearing on all sorts of objects as well as paintings. By the 18th century they were appearing on marquetry, furniture, tinglazed earthenware and porcelain as well as being painted in oils on canvas or watercolour and engraved as prints. All these treatments demanded different technical approaches, creating a variety of styles. With tinglazed earthenware the decorator worked on an absorbent, glazed surface which drank up the pigment instantly, while porcelain was painted over the glaze with ‘enamels’ which behaved much like oils. Marquetry was a jigsaw of very thinly cut sheets of wood, fitted together and stuck down to a carcase, which recreated a preliminary drawing. Landscapes on paper evolved from accurate ‘topographical’ drawings tinted with watercolour to a new medium, watercolour, which the British artist Turner was to develop into extraordinary heights of expressiveness.
What the artists expressed through their landscapes varied considerably, and this affected the way they painted. In his Descent from the Cross of c1530, the Master of Frankfurt created a hill towering over the group in the foreground so that he could show the actual site of the Crucifixion, Calvary, which he painted in meticulous detail. In the 18th century the Roman painter Bonavia used a storm off a rocky coastline to make a moral point about the fragility of man’s existence, filling the picture with emotion through his fluid brushstrokes, subtle colour contrasts and dizzying perspective. A different kind of emotion inspired the sensuously painted landscapes of the rococo painter Boucher, while his contemporaries, Canaletto and Guardi in Italy were following quite a different tradition of delicately painted, accurate transcriptions of the real world, stimulated by the work of Gaspar Van Wittel (Vanvitelli).
Methods of composing landscapes changed dramatically in the 19th century, with the advent of painting ‘en plein air’, in the open. Before, painters like Claude would sketch from life, then return to the studio to create a finished, considered painting from the sketch. Many like Ruisdael would make careful studies of botanical subjects which clearly fed into their finished paintings. When in the early 19th century Turner began to make finished paintings with the spontaneity of his sketches, he heralded a new focus for French painters. Artists like Boudin used freer brushwork to convey the transient effects of light and weather, to be followed by Courbet and the Impressionists.
The richness of landscape painting results from the way in which painters have always been influenced by each other. Thomas Barker of Bath was fascinated by Cuyp and Ruisdael, seen in many an English country house, while Joseph Wright of Derby drew on the work of Claude Vernet and Claude’s ideal landscapes powerfully influenced English painters like Richard Wilson. It was often not easy to live from landscape painting. Gainsborough would much have preferred it to the portraits he painted for his bread and butter, while Turner was savagely attacked by critics. Perhaps the happiest situation of all was that of Alfred Wallis, who painted purely for his own amusement and found himself an unexpected star.