Famous Landscape Paintings
Hills, rivers, fields and mountains from four centuries of painting, East and West.
16 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Landscape as a subject
Landscape became an independent subject in the seventeenth century and the dominant one in the nineteenth. The English painted their own countryside, Constable above all; the Germans painted the sublime; the Japanese printmakers Hokusai and Hiroshige made series of views that were the first landscapes many Europeans had seen from outside their own tradition, and they changed how Monet and Van Gogh looked at a field.
The works in this collection
Constable's The Hay Wain; Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog; Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed; Monet's Haystacks; Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows; Böcklin's Isle of the Dead; Hokusai's Red Fuji, Black Fuji, Kirifuri Waterfall and Amida Falls; Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido, Moon Pine at Ueno and Fukagawa Susaki; and the cityscapes, Vermeer's View of Delft, Caillebotte's Paris Street and Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi.
On the wall
A landscape is the easiest painting to live with. Wide works go above sofas and beds at 24×16 or 36×24; the upright Japanese views pair well, two or three in a row along a hallway.