Landscape art

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For the art of designing external spaces, see landscape architecture. For landscape photography, see nature photography.

Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the 1st century A.D., Roman frescoes of landscapes decorated rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes, for example.

Zhan Ziqian, Strolling About in Spring, c. 600.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565: Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors

Image:Frans Koppelaar - Landscape near Bologna.jpg

Image:Jane Frank Dorado No2.jpg

The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap (the German cognate is Landschaft) meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the late 17th century.

Early in the 15th century, landscape painting was established as an art genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert.

The Chinese tradition of "pure" landscape, in which the minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the viewer to participate in the experience, was well established by the time the oldest surviving ink paintings were executed.

[edit] Related -scapes

Skyscapes or Cloudscapes are depictions of clouds, weatherforms, and atmospheric conditions.
Moonscapes show the landscape of a moon.
Seascapes depict oceans or beaches.
Riverscapes depict rivers or creeks.
Cityscapes or townscapes depict cities (urban landscapes).
Hardscapes are paved over areas like streets and sidewalks, large business complexes and housing developments, and industrial areas.
Aerial landscapes depict a surface or ground from above, especially as seen from an airplane or spacecraft. (When the viewpoint is directly overhead, looking down, there is of course no depiction of a horizon or sky.) This genre can be combined with others, as in the aerial cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, the aerial moonscapes of Nancy Graves, or the aerial cityscapes of Yvonne Jacquette.
Inscapes are landscape-like (usually surrealist or abstract) artworks which seek to convey the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space. [For sources on this statement, see the Inscape (visual art) article.]