Landscape

Landscape is one of the principal genres of Western art, its subject being the natural environment: mountains, forests, rivers, fields, the sea and sky, as well as scenery altered by human hands. Landscape may be realistic, idealized, lyrical or wholly imaginary; it conveys not only a particular place but also a mood, a season, the quality of light and the artist's attitude to nature. For a long time, in the classical hierarchy of genres landscape occupied a low place, serving mostly as a background for religious or mythological scenes. As an independent genre landscape established itself in European art in the seventeenth century, notably among Dutch masters and in the classicizing compositions of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Its true flowering came in the nineteenth century: the Englishmen John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, the French painters of the Barbizon school and the Impressionists raised landscape to the level of a leading genre, making it a field for bold formal and colouristic experiment. In Ukrainian art landscape holds an honoured place: the vistas of Arkhip Kuindzhi with their inimitable light, the works of Serhii Vasylkivskyi and many other masters celebrated the nature of Ukraine — the steppe, the Dnipro and its villages — becoming an important part of the national artistic tradition.