The Landscape

As a genre of art, landscape is the depiction of natural scenery. It wasn’t until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that landscapes in Western art were released from the backgrounds of history paintings or portraits to become a subject of art in its own right.

Since then, the depiction of landscape has encompassed a wide-ranging set of artistic intentions. These vary from an appreciation of the beauty of nature to a highly constructed record of power and authority over place. During the Renaissance, Dutch and Flemish painters captured the detail and irregularity of nature with renowned accuracy. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, romantic pastoral views were largely a reaction to the increasing industrialisation and modernisation of society. At the turn of the twentieth century the impressionists took their painting practice outdoors, expanding the genre to include both natural and urban scenes.

What is Impressionism?

Originating in Paris in the late nineteenth century, impressionism was an art-historical movement provoked by a number of changes in technology. The advent of steam and electricity, urbanisation, and the rise of the bourgeoise – the middle classes who, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, could now afford leisure time – dramatically changed society. Impressionism was a response to these changes.

Key exponents of the movement included Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet, whose painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, sunrise), 1872, is considered responsible for the name of the movement. These artists were deeply interested in capturing fleeting scenes of everyday life, often taking their practice outside the studio, en plein air – in open air. The loose, rapid brushstrokes, more open composition and an emphasis on capturing the changing effects of light marked a dramatic shift from the preceding traditions of studio painting.

Monet to Matisse: Re-envisioning the world

As the global art world continued to expand, approaches to, and modes of, art expression began to evolve and mutate at pace, a myriad of new movements and styles having made their dramatic entry by the final decades of the nineteenth century.

By the late 1880s, the original group of Impressionists had begun to drift apart, with younger artists adopting the tenets of Impressionism and pushing these into new areas. The broad term ‘Post-Impressionist’ is applied to these emerging artistic movements, despite it being, by no means, a singular, cohesive style. Under the umbrella of Post- Impressionism sit Neo-Impressionism, Cloisonnism, Synthetism, Symbolism, Les Nabis, Fauvism and the Pont-Aven School. A period marked by significant experimentation, Post-Impressionism saw rapid developments in technique and style and a further disintegration of the rules and expectations of the established art world.

By this time, artists had begun to eschew objectivity and no longer sought to capture the inherent ‘truth’ of observation in their art. Artists now turned inwards to represent their own subjectivity; that is, to depict the world as they saw it. Desiring to be free from the perceived limitations of Impressionism, and in particular the commitment to rendering the effects of light and shade, they sought to create their ‘view’ of the world.

The Post-Impressionists envisioned a new artistic order, one unconstrained by the rules governing the representation of colour and form in the natural environment. They played with vivid (unnatural) colours and utilised impasto to create three-dimensional surfaces. Under the banner of what is now termed Post-Impressionism, these artists used their work as a conduit for the expression of emotion and concepts beyond what could be seen through immediate visual inspection, their works becoming the realisation of deeper concepts and sensations.

Text by Tansy Curtin, Assistant Director, Artistic and Collection Programs, Catalogue for Monet to Matisse: Defying Tradition