Landscape painting - the genre's history, masters, and characteristics of painted landscapes
Landscape painting is the branch of art that makes nature the protagonist instead of the background, and it is the genre most Swedes choose when they hang a painting or poster at home. A landscape can be a mountain wall in backlight, a misty field in October, or a horizon where the sea meets the sky with nothing else happening. For most of art history, such motifs were regarded as subordinate - nature appeared in the picture, but only to frame a saint’s legend, a battle, or a portrait. Only when landscape was allowed to stand alone did the genre we know today emerge.
This guide follows the journey of landscape painting from Joachim Patinir’s panoramic world landscapes around 1520, through the Dutch Golden Age’s marketable views and the Barbizon school’s plein-air painting, to Marcus Larson’s Swedish waterfalls and the visionary Nordic nature of the turn of the century. You will learn what technically distinguishes a landscape from a nature study, which subgenres exist, which museums in Sweden preserve this heritage - and how to translate four hundred years of pictorial tradition into motifs that work above the sofa.
Contents
↓ What is landscape painting?
↓ The history of landscape painting - from backdrop to main subject
↓ The Dutch Golden Age - the genre becomes independent
↓ Subgenres and recurring motifs
↓ Technique, composition, and light
↓ The 19th century - Barbizon, the Hudson River, and plein-air painting
↓ The 20th century - landscape after Naturalism
↓ Swedish and Nordic landscape painting
↓ Landscape painting at home - how to choose a motif
↓ Timeline - the development of the genre
↓ Related art movements and artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about landscape painting
What is landscape painting?
Landscape painting is defined by nature being the actual subject of the picture. It is not enough for a painting to contain trees, mountains, or water - a Renaissance history painting often includes both mountains and rivers, but they serve the narrative. In a landscape painting, the relationship is reversed: any people are staffage figures, small figures that lend scale and movement to a scene that would work without them.
The genre hierarchy formalized by the French Academy of Art in the 17th century placed history painting at the top, followed by portraiture, genre painting, landscape, and finally still life. The fact that landscape ranked second-lowest explains why so many early landscape painters furnished their views with a biblical or mythological figure: it raised the work’s status among buyers. That hierarchy held until the mid-19th century, when plein-air painting and the growing middle class together overturned the order.
Today, landscape is the commercially strongest image genre of all. It works because it offers the gaze a depth that the room itself lacks - a wall with a landscape becomes psychologically larger than an empty wall. This is also why nature motifs dominate among posters with nature motifs and in the broader category artworks by famous artists.
Quick facts: The founder of the genre in the West is considered to be Joachim Patinir (c. 1480–5 October 1524), who worked in Antwerp. In 1521, Albrecht Dürer called him “der gute Landschaftsmaler” in his travel diary - the first known use of the word Landschaft in an artistic sense. In China, the corresponding genre, shan shui (“mountain-water”), had already reached its peak during the Song dynasty, 960–1279. Landscape became an independent market commodity in the Netherlands in the 17th century. The French Academy's genre hierarchy placed landscape second-lowest out of five. The auction record for a landscape painting is held by J.M.W. Turner's Rome, from Mount Aventine, sold at Sotheby's in London on 3 December 2014 for £30.3 million. In Sweden, most 19th-century landscape painting is held by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
The history of landscape painting - from backdrop to main subject
The idea that nature could carry an image entirely on its own is relatively young in Europe. The path to it runs through three distinct stages: the decorative natural spaces of antiquity, the panoramic images of the Flemish Renaissance, and the specialization of the Dutch market.
Antiquity and the Middle Ages - nature as a backdrop
Roman villas had wall paintings depicting gardens, coastal views, and pastoral scenes, among the best known those from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta. These room decorations were illusionistic natural spaces rather than independent works - they lacked a frame, signature, and the delimitations that make a painting an object. During the Middle Ages, nature shrank further. Gold backgrounds in altarpieces replaced the sky, and the landscape was reduced to symbolic clusters of trees and stylized hills marking where an event took place.
Patinir and the world landscape
The breakthrough came in Antwerp. Around 1515–1524, Joachim Patinir developed what art history calls the world landscape, Weltlandschaft: a panoramic view seen from an elevated position, where the gaze swept across plains, rivers, rock formations, and distant cities in a single continuous slice of the world. The religious figures remain, but are strikingly small, sometimes barely discernible. Patinir's panels were horizontal and relatively small, a format that later became the norm for the genre.
Technically, Patinir introduced the color scale that came to define depth in landscape painting: brown and warm in the foreground, green in the middle ground, and blue toward the horizon. This is the basic scheme of aerial perspective, and it is still used by illustrators and photographers. Patinir's successors in the Netherlands, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, adopted both the panorama and the color gradation.
Shan shui - China's parallel tradition
While Europe was still treating nature as a backdrop, China had a fully developed landscape genre. Shan shui, literally "mountain-water picture," was painted with brush and ink on silk or paper and rose to prominence during the 10th and 11th centuries. With Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, Fan Kuan (c. 960-c. 1030) created one of the tradition's absolute masterpieces: a hanging scroll dominated by an enormous central mountain, with a dense foreground and veils of mist that both separate and connect the zones of the image.
The difference from the European tradition is fundamental. Shan shui did not strive to depict a particular place but to express the order of nature - a cosmic vision in which humans are small but not insignificant. This aesthetic reached Europe in earnest only through Japanese woodblock prints in the 19th century and still shapes the restrained, airy visual tradition seen in Japandi posters.
The Dutch Golden Age - the genre becomes independent
Landscape painting became a completely independent genre in the Netherlands in the 17th century. The reasons were practical. The Dutch Republic was recognized as an independent state by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Protestant Church did not commission altarpieces, and a prosperous bourgeoisie bought art directly on the open market. Painters therefore specialized in what sold: views, coastal scenes, winter scenes, and city silhouettes in formats suited to an ordinary living room.
Ruisdael and the Dutch landscape
Jacob van Ruisdael (c. 1628-1682) is the Golden Age's most influential landscape painter. He worked across an unusually broad range - waterfalls, winter landscapes, coastal scenes, panoramic views of Haarlem with bleaching fields and church towers - and gave the sky a dominant role. In his compositions, clouds often occupy two thirds of the surface, which became a Northern European hallmark. Ruisdael's blend of topographical credibility and dramatic lighting was later taken up by both British and Nordic painters.
Claude Lorrain and the Arcadian ideal
In Rome, a completely different tradition developed in parallel. Claude Lorrain (1604/05-1682), a Frenchman living in Italy, constructed his landscapes according to rational principles of form: a dark tree or ruin in the foreground as a repoussoir, a middle ground with shepherds or biblical figures, and an opening onto a sea shimmering in the morning or evening sun. The result is known as an Arcadian or idyllic landscape and represents an idealized Italy rather than a documented place.
Claude’s composition became a template that endured for two centuries. English landowners had parks laid out after his paintings, and J.M.W. Turner requested in his will that two of his own works be hung beside Claude’s in the National Gallery. The strength of British Romanticism was largely due to the fact that Claude’s formula provided something to engage with - and to break away from.
Subgenres and recurring motifs
Landscape painting is not a uniform category but a cluster of subgenres with different rules, clientele and visual languages. The three most important for anyone choosing a motif for the wall are the sublime landscape, marine painting and the winter landscape.
The sublime landscape
The sublime is based on philosopher Edmund Burke’s distinction from 1757 between the beautiful, which pleases, and the sublime, which overwhelms. In painting, this translates into ravines, avalanches, storms and mountain ranges that place the viewer at a disadvantage. Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner are the genre’s two poles: Friedrich quiet and metaphysical, Turner violent and atmospheric. Turner’s auction record of £30.3 million for Rome, from Mount Aventine says something about how highly the market still values this type of image; John Constable’s record for The Lock from 1824 stands at £22.4 million.
Marine painting and coastal landscapes
Marine painting emerged from Dutch seafaring and was documentary in the beginning - shipowners commissioned images of their vessels. The genre quickly developed into studies of atmosphere in which water, haze and light are the true subject. The coastal landscape is its gentler relative and the motif that currently sells best in Swedish homes, partly because the horizon line makes a small room feel wider. Pure sea and sky motifs work especially well in black-and-white posters, where the absence of color enhances the tonal range.
The winter landscape
The winter landscape is a Northern European specialty rooted in Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow from 1565. The Little Ice Age brought frozen canals and snow-laden villages that patrons recognized during the 17th century, and the genre enjoyed a revival in Scandinavia in the 19th century. Technically, the winter landscape is demanding because snow is never white: it carries the room’s entire color temperature, from warm pink in low sunlight to deep blue in shadow.
“Painting is but another word for feeling.” – John Constable, letter to John Fisher, 1821
Technique, composition and light
What makes a landscape convincing is rarely the wealth of detail, but rather the handling of depth and light. Two sets of tools recur throughout the history of the genre.
Repoussoir, aerial perspective, and the horizon line
Repoussoir is a dark element at the edge of the image - a tree, a rock, a ruin - that draws the eye inward. Aerial perspective means that colors become lighter, bluer, and less contrasty the farther away they are, because the atmosphere scatters the light. Patinir codified the principle in three color zones as early as the 1520s; Leonardo da Vinci described the same phenomenon in his notes during the same period.
The placement of the horizon line determines the character of the image more than any other choice. A low horizon, as in Ruisdael, gives the sky power and creates spaciousness. A high horizon compresses the space and directs attention to the texture of the ground. A horizon exactly in the middle is almost always perceived as static, which is why in practice it is avoided by everyone except those who want to create precisely a sense of stillness.
Plein-air painting and the painted sketch
Until the 19th century, landscapes were painted in the studio from sketches. Three technical changes altered this: the metal tube for oil paint was patented in 1841, portable easels became affordable, and the railway made the countryside accessible within a day. Plein-air painting - completing the work on site in front of the subject - became possible on a large scale.
The consequence was more than practical. When the light changes during the course of the work, the painter is forced to work quickly and summarily, producing the looser brushwork first seen among the Barbizon painters and later culminating in Impressionism. Those who want to follow this thread further can find the background in our guide to Impressionism.
The 19th century - Barbizon, the Hudson River, and plein-air painting
During the 19th century, landscape rose from the second-lowest rank to art's most contested and best-selling genre. Two schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic drove this development.
The Barbizon school
The Barbizon school was active from approximately 1830 to 1870 and was named after the village of Barbizon near the Forest of Fontainebleau, about 60 kilometers south of Paris. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot came there in the spring of 1829 to paint and returned in the autumn of 1830 and the summer of 1831 for drawings and oil studies. From 1833 onward, Théodore Rousseau began spending long periods there and became the group's natural leader. Jean-François Millet and Charles-François Daubigny also belonged to the circle.
The Barbizon painters rejected both academic conventions and the drama of Düsseldorf Romanticism in favor of unsentimental, close-up depictions of ordinary nature - a clearing, a dusty road, a herd of cattle seen against the light. They took inspiration from the Dutch painters of the 17th century and from John Constable, whose works were shown in Paris in 1824. The school is considered the direct precursor of Impressionism.
Hudson River School
In the United States, landscape became a nation-building project. Thomas Cole (1801–1848), born in England and emigrating in 1818, traveled to the Catskill Mountains in 1825 and painted three canvases based on his sketches. They were exhibited from October 26 to November 4, 1825, in the window of Colman's bookstore in New York, where they were discovered by three influential artists and brought Cole immediate commissions. From this grew the Hudson River School, active roughly from 1825–1875, which made the American wilderness an independent pictorial tradition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves one of the school's most important collections.
The 20th Century - Landscape After Naturalism
When photography took over documentation, the purpose of landscape painting ceased to be resemblance. The genre survived nonetheless, but the subject became a means rather than an end: an opportunity to examine color, structure, and the conditions of seeing.
Cézanne and the Construction of Landscape
Paul Cézanne painted the Sainte-Victoire mountain in Provence in an estimated eighty paintings and watercolors between the 1880s and his death in 1906. He treated the landscape as a problem in geometry and planes of color: instead of depicting depth with lines, he built the space from small parallel brushstrokes whose color temperature shifts. Warm tones advance, while cool ones recede. This method made him the starting point for Cubism and is why he is often called the father of modern art.
From Expressionism to Contemporary Images of Nature
The Expressionists reversed the relationship between external and internal nature. In Der Blaue Reiter, the meadow became a field of pure color, while in Egon Schiele's work, autumn trees as thin as threads were transformed into body language. In parallel, the topographical tradition continued in a subdued, almost documentary form among artists who worked with the most ordinary landscapes - the parking lot, the roadside along a motorway, the edge of the woods behind the suburban homes.
During the 1960s and 1970s, land art stepped completely beyond the canvas and made the land itself its material, while painting was joined by landscape photography as an art form in its own right. That branch is clearly visible in the subdued visual language of black-and-white posters, where the format and horizon line function just as they do in 17th-century Dutch vistas, but where light is recorded rather than painted.
Swedish and Nordic Landscape Painting
Swedish and Nordic landscape painting is unusually well documented and unusually beloved, making it a natural starting point for anyone who wants to bring Nordic nature into their home. Three stages define its development.
The Düsseldorf School and Marcus Larson
Between 1850 and 1865, the Düsseldorf Academy of Art attracted a large number of Nordic artists. The style was still Romantic, but oriented toward the national and distinctive. Simon Marcus Larson, born in 1825, lived in Düsseldorf from 1852 to 1855 as a private student of Andreas Achenbach and became Swedish national Romanticism's most dramatic landscape painter. His Waterfall in Småland is in the Nationalmuseum collection and shows the essence of the genre: rushing water, backlighting, and nature that is greater than the viewer.
Edvard Bergh and the Royal Academy's Landscape School
Johan Edvard Bergh, trained in Düsseldorf, led the landscape school established at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1858 and became a professor there in 1867. During the 1860s, he developed a more realistic form of landscape painting featuring the tranquil nature of central Sweden: lakes, deciduous trees, and grazing cows in afternoon light. Bergh's teaching shaped an entire generation and laid the foundation for late nineteenth-century Swedish depictions of nature, later deepened by, among others, Bruno Liljefors and Prince Eugen.
Female Pioneers and the Visionary Landscape
Around 1890–1920, an expressive, almost spiritual form of landscape painting developed in Sweden, in which nature became a vehicle for inner states. For a long time, this period was written about almost exclusively through the work of male artists. The exhibition Female Pioneers – Visionary Landscapes at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, shown from 4 March to 20 August 2023 with nearly 100 paintings, highlighted four of them: Ester Almqvist, Anna Boberg, Ellen Trotzig, and Charlotte Wahlström. One section was devoted to the significance of Theosophy for Swedish landscape painting of the period - the same spiritual movement that shaped Hilma af Klint.
Waldemarsudde continues to explore nature's visual world: in 2026, The Blooming - Art & Botany will be on display in the Gallery from 14 March to 13 September. Those who want to explore the botanical branch of nature motifs can find it in our guide to botanical art and in our selection of Swedish artworks.
Landscape painting in the home - how to choose a motif
Landscape is the genre that is easiest to live with and hardest to choose the wrong format for. Two questions determine the result: where the horizon falls in relation to eye level, and whether the motif's color temperature matches the room's light.
Format and horizon line
Landscape format emphasizes the width of the scene and works best above a sofa, bed, or sideboard, where the motif can follow the furniture's line. Portrait format suits narrow wall sections and stairwells, but requires a motif with vertical structure - a waterfall, a rock face, a tree trunk - otherwise the image will mostly be sky. A practical rule is to hang it so that the horizon line in the picture is approximately at eye level for a standing person, about 145-150 centimeters above the floor, so that the eye meets the depth of the image rather than its edge.
The size should relate to the furniture beneath it. A picture surface approximately two-thirds the width of the sofa feels balanced; for somewhat smaller motifs, a group of two or three works better than a single one. In the 50x70 centimeter format, most landscape motifs have sufficient space without dominating a standard-sized living room.
Color temperature and the room's light
A landscape in a cool blue-gray palette - mist, winter, Nordic coast - reinforces the impression in a north-facing room and can make it feel chilly. In a south-facing room, where the daylight is warm, the same motif balances the room instead. Conversely, warm motifs with ochre, rust, and golden backlighting brighten a dark room but can feel heavy in light that is already warm. A simple test is to hold the motif against the wall at three different times of day before choosing a frame.
Tips: If you have a room with high ceilings, the eye is automatically drawn upward, which means a lone painting can easily end up too high. Instead, find a horizontal line in the room - the top edge of the window frame or the line of the door casing - and let the landscape's horizon follow it. This ties the picture to the architecture instead of leaving it floating. Read more about how ceiling height affects the experience in our article on the cathedral effect.
Timeline – the development of the genre
Around the year 1000, Chinese shan shui painting reached its first peak with Fan Kuan's Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, painted during the Song dynasty, 960–1279. In 1521, Albrecht Dürer noted in his travel diary from the Netherlands that Joachim Patinir was a good landscape painter, marking the first known use of the word Landschaft for an artistic specialty; Patinir died on October 5, 1524. In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Hunters in the Snow and established the winter landscape as a subject in its own right.
During the 17th century, landscape became an independent market commodity in the Netherlands, strengthened by the republic's recognition through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; Jacob van Ruisdael and Claude Lorrain, both of whom died in 1682, formulated the genre's two main strands – the observed and the idealized. In 1757, Edmund Burke published his treatise on the sublime, providing the theoretical foundation for Romantic landscape painting.
In 1825, Thomas Cole traveled to the Catskill Mountains and exhibited in October of the same year the paintings that became the impetus for the Hudson River School. From 1830, the Barbizon School gathered around the Forest of Fontainebleau, and in 1841 the metal tube for oil paint was patented, making plein-air painting practically possible. In 1858, the landscape school was established at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, with Edvard Bergh as its leading force; he became a professor in 1867. Between 1850 and 1865, Düsseldorf attracted an entire generation of Nordic landscape painters, including Marcus Larson, who stayed there from 1852 to 1855.
On December 3, 2014, Turner's Rome, from Mount Aventine was sold at Sotheby's in London for £30.3 million, setting a record for a British landscape painting. In 2023, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde presented Women Pioneers – Visionary Landscapes with nearly one hundred works, and during 2026 the museum continues with The Blooming – Art & Botany from March 14 to September 13.
Related art movements and artists
Landscape painting spans almost every era, making it a good entry point into art history. Romanticism gave the genre its drama, and the most important figure in the sublime landscape is described in our guide to Caspar David Friedrich. You can find the British counterpart, the painter of light and the sea, in the guide to William Turner.
The Nordic branch is explored further in the pages on national romanticism and the Skagen painters, who made Nordic light their true subject. Among Swedish landscape painters, Carl Fredrik Hill holds a special position with his reduced French landscapes from the 1870s. For those who want to see how the landscape dissolves into pure color effects, post-Impressionism is the next step. A complete overview of periods and movements can be found in the main guide to art history, and all fact pages are collected in the Knowledge Base. The genre's closest neighbor - the sea, ships, and storms as main subjects - has its own guide on the page about marine painting.
If you would like to read more about how landscape motifs work in practice, there are guides to posters for a mountain cabin, alpine chic as an interior design style, and Egon Schiele's landscape painting.
Frequently asked questions about landscape painting
Landscape painting has survived five centuries because it does something few other genres can: it gives a wall depth. If you want to bring that effect home, you’ll find our complete selection of nature motifs among posters with nature motifs, and the visual world of Swedish masters among Swedish artworks.
Learn more about the genre's origins in the encyclopedia entry landscape painting.