Impressionism. Post-Impressionism. European Landscape Art after Post-Impressionism

Impressionism as an artistic style dates from the 1860s, when artists moved away from more established traditions of painting by focusing on the way light could be represented by bright colors, often through a series of studies at different times of the day. Impressionism was a term coined by hostile critics in 1874 in reference to a painting exhibited by the French painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) entitled Impression: Sunrise. Impressionists painted "impressions" of the landscape, of the sensations caused by the landscape, rather than the details of the landscape itself.

Impressionist painters focused on rural, suburban, and urban landscapes as well as on scenes from modern life. Combined with an unorthodox treatment of colors and shapes, Impressionist landscapes were initially unpopular.

Post-Impressionism. Impressionism, with its emphasis on the personal freedom of the artists, laid the groundwork for modern art. During the late nineteenth century artists who wanted to take Impressionist art beyond what they saw as its limitations have been described as "PostImpressionists," although there are few similarities between these painters beyond their experiences with Impressionism.

During the late nineteenth century the Post-Impressionist French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) influenced the vision of landscape art through his belief that "all forms in nature... are based upon the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder" (Langdon 1996, 717), a perception evident in a series of views of Mont Sainte-Victoire painted between 1902 and 1906.

The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painted nostalgic agricultural landscapes full of movement, such as the 1889 work Wheat Field and Cypress Trees. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a follower of Cezanne, turned to rural life as the subject of his landscape paintings, looking for the "hidden world of feeling" lost in modern, industrial society (Janson 1991, 689).

European Landscape Art after Post-Impressionism. Although landscape as a subject for composition remains an important artistic genre, it no longer holds the importance in the first years of the twenty-first century that it held from the sixteenth through the end of the nineteenth centuries.

Two world wars, globalization, and the destruction of the natural environment have influenced a reverential view of nature that in many ways recalled the Romantic landscape artists' emotional response to nature. Landscape art in the twenty-first century remains a reflection of human interaction with nature.

Further Reading:
Adams, L. S. (1994). A history of Western art. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Andrews, M. (1999). Landscape and Western art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bermingham, A. (1986). Landscape and ideology: The English rustic tradition 1740-1860. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Brown, C. (1996). Making and meaning: Rubens's landscapes. London: National Gallery of Art.
Champa, K. S. (1991). The rise of landscape painting in France: Corot to Monet. Manchester, NH: Currier Gallery of Art.
Janson, H. W. (1991). The history of art. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Klonk, C. (1996). Science and the perception of nature: British landscape art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Langdon, H. (1996). Landscape painting. In J. Turner (Ed.), The dictionary of art. London: Macmillan.
Lucie-Smith, E. (1971). A concise history of French painting. New York: Praeger Publishing.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Landscape and power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Novak, B. (1995). Nature and culture: American landscape and painting 1825-1875. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosenthal, M. (1982). British landscape painting. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Rubin, J. H. (1999). Impressionism. London: Phaidon Press.
Silver, L. (1993). Art in history. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Stechow, W. (1968). Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century. London: Phaidon Press.
Turner, A. R. (1966). The visions of landscape in Renaissance Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.