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Here landscape art is used as a way of exploring the implications of the fact that all experience of the divine through the natural world is conditioned. Seven types of approach across the centuries are distinguished and the degree of their conditioning assessed: ‘Sacramental Placing’ looks at Aboriginal dream painting; ‘Symbolic Reminder’ at the use of animals as pointers to the divine; ‘Cosmic Order’ at artists such as Poussin; ‘Transcendent Awe’ in Friedrich and Cole; ‘Mystic Immanence’ in Rubens, Palmer, and Constable; ‘Vibrant Colour’ in van Gogh and Cézanne; and ‘Deep Form’ in Mondrian, Kandinsky and Klee. Throughout, it is maintained that the visual can constitute an argument for the nature of the divine no less forceful than one expressed in words. To that end, the last three artists are used to illustrate how each wrestled with the problem of evil and came up with alternative ‘solutions.’

The study of the scenes known as sacro-idyllic in Roman wall-painting allows us to identify the number of women and children present in them. But the kind of activities they are pursuing and why they are present in these external scenes must still be questioned. Some of them may be participating in religious initiatory ceremonies or in a cult dedicated to the dead.

This chapter discusses the importance of landscape painting in the formation of early twentieth-century Canadian national identity, in particular the Theosophical aspirations and quest for the genius loci of the Group of Seven painters in Ontario, and Emily Carr in British Columbia. Jeff Wall’s published texts that describe the influence of Carr on his peers’ work, and their desire to work outside of the problematic of colonialism, necessitates this examination. Historian Lorenzo Veracini’s discussions of the many narratives utilized by settler colonial societies to authenticate and rationalize their rights to indigenous land are introduced in relationship to the discursive framing of texts that supported and documented Lawren Harris and Carr’s paintings. The national and regional legacy of spiritually-infused landscape painting was antithetical to young artists and intellectuals like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who came to maturity in the late 1960s, and who were committed to revealing man’s alienation from his industrial environment through Marxist-informed critiques of capitalism.

This chapter details the life and work of Jervis McEntee, a second-generation Hudson River School landscape painter whose working career spanned the years from 1850 to 1890. McEntee belong to a large group of artists who worked principally in New York City and gained national acclaim for their portrayal of the Hudson River, the Catskills and Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and the coast and interior of Maine. Collectively, these artists helped define the nation's cultural identity in terms of nature, which they considered the birthright of the New World. Better remembered as a diarist than as a painter, McEntee wrote eloquently about his ideals of art yet also expressed frustration at the difficulties of forging a successful career in his chosen profession. He persevered and established a place for himself in the New York art world: a number of his contemporaries—critics, patrons, and fellow artists alike—considered the small, intimate landscapes for which he is best known, and the muted palette of late autumn and winter colors associated with his work, as original and important contributions to the American landscape tradition.

This chapter explores the complex interrelationships among nature, art, and the history of industrious “progress” in the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on early American painting and aesthetics, the chapter takes a look at the idle man and how he is governed by the necessity of repose. It also draws on the writings of Thomas Cole, the art theory of Washington Allston, and the works of mid-century luminist painting to discuss the concept of repose and how it shaped the prevailing conventions of American landscape painting. In particular, it examines the ways that Cole broadens the protocols for experiencing nature, while illuminating how the traditional sublime is appropriated by the road to progress. In addition, it considers Karl Marx's concern with the relation between the appearance of harmony and the sublimity of progress. The chapter concludes by highlighting the utility and superfluity of American painting.

This chapter details the life and work of Thomas Cole, the artist most closely associated with the Hudson River. Cole was a devoted landscape tourist who traveled extensively throughout the valley and beyond in search of subjects for his art. His arrival in New York City in 1825 is generally considered the beginning of the Hudson River School of landscape painting—the first New York school. Although Cole was not the first to depict the American landscape, his arrival in New York remains a useful landmark because the exhibition of his first important paintings electrified the artistic community, and subsequent works would continue to do so for much of the twenty-three years until his death in 1848. With the revival of interest in American art in the mid-twentieth century, Cole became the most recognizable figure in the history of American landscape painting. He is important because he is so closely associated with the Hudson River valley and because his paintings and writings, more than the work of any other contemporary artist, attempted to shape how Americans perceived the landscape.

This chapter argues that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists seem to have been especially attracted by quarries, treating them as a means of exploring modernity through the lens of rural romanticism. Quarries regularly appear in paintings in many of the artists associated with rural modernity: William Rothenstein, Edward Wadsworth, Walter Bell, Roger Fry, and J. D. Fergusson, among them. Appreciating that there is no single way of categorising and representing quarries, this chapter (the first ever study of this important subject) explores many of the common themes to be found in paintings of quarries in the first half of the twentieth century. It considers a wide range of artists and art-works — the majority of which are owned by rural art galleries — in close relation to the history of rural industries in such regions as Cornwall, West Yorkshire, and Edinburgh.

This chapter discusses the topographical landscape of the fifteenth century and the so-called world landscape of the early sixteenth century as exemplified in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. It shows how Lorenzetti’s vision is distinct from the “topocosmos” of the Middle Ages, as shown in the study of the history of the pictorial imagination. In Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Jacob Burckhardt coined the memorable phrase “all foreground without distance” that applies to the visual conventions used to represent nature and landscape in the pictorial arts of the Middle Ages. However, there can be no landscape without a horizon in the distance; therefore, the discovery of perspective becomes the sole criterion for the development of landscape painting.

This chapter examines British work on Chinese and Japanese studies. It explains that for a significant part of the twentieth century British sinologists have been trendsetters worldwide in the field of medieval studies. Most of the British research focused on Tun-huang studies, the Taoist canon, Buddhist temple art, Chinese landscape painting, Sung porcelain and Chinese poetry. This chapter also stresses the need to examine the concepts of gender and egalitarianism with the framework of current trends in medieval sinology.

Major developments in geographical sciences at the turn of the century contributed to a new vision of landscape which informed the aesthetics of landscape painting and was promoted by the progressive Institución Libre de Enseñanza, where Machado was educated. However, his poetry of landscape has been interpreted as a nostalgic escape from modernity, identifying his vision with nineteenth-century nature poetry. Chapter 2 explores the temporal dimension that often inflects his poetry of landscape, destabilizing its alignment with both Romanticism and the generation of 1898. Machado’s treatment of landscape reveals a sense of place that goes against its conceptualization as fixed and stable, introducing a temporal dimension that grounds his vision in the poetics of modernity. Whereas his landscape poems convey a strong sense of place, they also reveal an interest in the production of space, and show an ambivalent attitude towards the rapidly transforming world of modernity characteristic of the modernist vision.

This chapter examines the extent to which U.S. appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period experienced U.S. geographies through the lens of the picturesque, an expression of English romanticism associated with eighteenth-century aesthetes such as William Gilpin, Humphrey Repton, and Uvedale Price. Arguing that Emerson’s Nature (1836) engages an antebellum fascination with the picturesque while contesting some of its terms, the chapter takes up the picturesque’s emphasis upon unified, grand sweeps of nature as it would resonate with increasing anxieties over the literal, political division of U.S. lands.

This chapter discusses the development of tourism in the Hudson Valley. According to historian John Sears, there were three prerequisites for the emergence of tourism in nineteenth-century America: the growth of an urban class that had the money and leisure to begin exploring the countryside; the construction of an adequate transportation system; and the development of an infrastructure to provide safe, comfortable accommodations for travelers. In 1823, a group of merchants from Catskill, New York, acquired a seven-acre tract of land known as Pine Orchard and built a “large and commodious hotel” there. After the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) that the Livingston monopoly on steamboat navigation on the river was unconstitutional, several new lines were organized. By 1830 there were eight lines operating twenty-nine steamboats on the Hudson, which both increased the efficiency of travel and led to significant decreases in cost. Other developments that promoted tourism include the emergence and public embrace of landscape painting as an appropriate form of American expression in the arts; and the publication of books such as Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York (1822) and guidebooks such as The Tourist (1830). The people who visited Hudson Valley are considered first-generation consumers of the American landscape, both in the sense that building facilities for tourists transformed that landscape, and because many tourists undoubtedly thought of scenery as a commodity to be experienced.

John Constable is often thought of as a painter of trees, canals and meadows; country labourers and wagons. His coastal paintings are considered a somewhat peripheral part of his output. Yet they are central to his concerns with light, atmosphere and weather. This chapter looks at Constable’s studies of the coast in relation to three important meanings it held for him and for many others of this time. The sea seen from the coast was a metaphor for life, death, immortality and the power of a benevolent Creator; the sea and shore together constituted a boundary which protected Britain from enemy invasion; and the coastal region was a place of fresh breezes, a source of easy breathing and life-giving fecundity.

This chapter examines developments in Japanese painting during the period 1937–1952. Militaristic and imperialistic policies in the 1930s led to the outbreak of full-scale war in China in 1937, referred to in Japan as the “China Incident.” This was followed by the Great East Asia War, also known as the Pacific theater of World War II, that ended with Japan’s surrender in 1945. Japan’s rise and fall during this tumultuous period generated pressing social needs and exhilarating ideological passions that proved to be a boon for artistic initiatives, particularly painting. This chapter first considers landscape painting and its projection of Japan’s imperial expansion before discussing the military bureaucracy’s intervention in the art world that undermined artistic autonomy. It then explores how the military bureaucracy sought to exploit the propagandistic value of commissioned war paintings to stimulate the public to greater sacrifice for the war effort. It also describes how, during the American occupation, various modernist painters’ groups and publications that had been terminated under the military bureaucracy enjoyed a resurgence.

Many interwar English artists sought comfort from their experiences of World War I in renditions of rural landscape that were also occasions of advance-mourning for future international conflict. Three of these painters—Paul Nash, David Jones, and Eric Ravilious—are the subjects of Eluned Summers-Bremner’s chapter. It explores how, in Nash’s work, natural land forms are made into modern historical agents, and in Jones’s into de-temporalised signs of modernity’s engagement with the rural. In contrast, Ravilious’s interwar and early wartime landscapes might be said to enact the estrangement of the rural by modernity. The chapter argues that in images of the rural by these three artists, all impacted by English wars, landscape is visibly altered by composition and method as much as by modernization. Through formal close readings it becomes clear that we are not looking at a product of rural nostalgia but at something more prescient and unnerving.

Taking as a guiding principle the belief that in order to be an effective musical rhetorician, performers should have an understanding of the principles of rhetorical composition, Chapters 3 and 4 examine the presence of eloquence and passionate expression in the cantatas of Bach. Chapter 3 focuses on Bach’s imitation of the natural world with examples taken from his sacred cantatas. It challenges the belief that Bach was above mere word painting, but to the contrary, he grounded his expression in the depiction of recognizable worldly objects and actions. The concluding section of the chapter examines the relationship between Bach’s music and the eighteenth-century debate surrounding landscape painting.

This chapter argues that Humboldt’s “ecological insight” is founded on an aesthetic view of nature, achieved through engagement with the visual arts, in particular landscape painting. While Goethe’s influence on Humboldt is widely recognized, what is less recognized is the specific way in which Humboldt departs from Goethe. This chapter contends—contra the majority of interpretations—that the main point of difference between Goethe and Humboldt has less to do with Humboldt’s focus on context (i.e., the environment) and Goethe’s focus on the form of living beings, and more to do with Humboldt’s specific conceptualization of the relationship between living beings and their environments. Humboldt’s predecessors had recognized the significant role that the environment plays in the shaping of the organism. None, however, had adequately recognized the role of the organism in shaping the environment. By focusing on trees, and working with the tools of the visual arts, Humboldt was able to discern and convey the reciprocal causal relation between living beings and their contexts, and thus conclude that any conceptualization of the environment as something that preexists its inhabitants is a false abstraction. Humboldt’s insight was radical for his time, but––perhaps surprisingly––it also remains radical today.