A Landscape is more than just Nature

”...there is a great impulse to do landscapes...” as painter Philipp Otto Runge announced in 1802. Landscape painting developed during the 19th century to become one of the foremost genres in art. And it came to mirror an entire epoch with all its variety and wealth of expression. Landscape painting was born out of a feeling of alienation between humanity and nature.

Civilisation, industrialisation and scientific developments had greatly changed the way nature was viewed. The countryside was now experienced with the distance of an observer, who for the first time saw himself as part of a historical development. It was this standpoint that finally allowed landscape painting to establish itself as an independent category of painting. The landscape paintings became a means for expressing hopes, longings, and fears, and the way it was formulated underwent radical changes. Landscapes no longer served merely as backdrops for heroic deeds or historical events. Different kinds of landscape painting would now convey a sense of awe, for instance, at the forces of nature, or depict geological prodigies. And of paramount importance for the veduta was the faithful rendering of the landscape’s topography. The Romantics discovered the landscape as a symbol of human existence and created corre-spondences between inner states and those found in nature.

Their images reflect the disappointment of a young generation which, following the French Revolution, had also hoped for political change in Germany. From the middle of the century on, symbolic meanings re-ceded increasingly into the background. Nature was now explored in painterly terms, focusing on geographical factors and the influence of the light and the changing seasons. The landscape was no longer painted as something special, but rather in its everyday countenance.