landscape painting: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

England produced the major late 19th-century landscape masters: the visionary Turner and the poetic Constable. Constable, who greatly influenced the French Romantics, also served as an important inspiration to the Barbizon school in France, whose members returned to the serene pastoral mood. In Germany, C. D. Friedrich sustained the poetic tradition of landscape, as did the luminists of the American Hudson River school. Turner's exploration of the atmospheric effects of light interested Monet, whose plein-air works, forming the basis of impressionism, elevated landscape to the highest position in artists' esteem that it had yet held.

Landscape also became a principal source material of postimpressionism. The exponents of surrealism revealed the fearful power of imaginary landscape. In addition, many of the 20th-century artists working in the abstract idiom have employed both landscape and still life as basic sources for their widely differing work.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Landscape Art in the East
• The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• The Renaissance and the Sixteenth Century
• Early Landscapes
• Bibliography

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