English borrowed “landscape” from Dutch painters first
The word entered English as landskip around 1600—from Dutch landschap—and meant a painting before it meant a view; its first recorded use for a picture is 1598. Pure landscapes without people appear as early as Minoan frescoes around 1500 BCE. In East Asia, mountain-water ink stood atop the genre ladder; in the West it long sat near the bottom.
Landscape art arranges mountains, valleys, rivers, and sky into a wide coherent scene; weather often matters. Two deep streams—Western painting and Chinese shan shui—each run more than a thousand years. East Asian landscapes carried Daoist spiritual charge from the start; the West named that charge mainly with Romanticism. Imaginary vistas dominate literati taste, while topographical prints of real places were often ranked lower—mirroring Chinese prejudices against professional “real view” painters.
Egypt’s Nebamun tomb frescoes (c. 1350 BC) pack plants and hunters more than overall space. Greeks seem to have developed distance scaling in the Hellenistic age; Romans left room frescoes and mosaics from the first century BCE at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Chinese panoramas and Roman ones both use mountain backdrops to bridge near figures and far vistas. Medieval Europe nearly forgot landscape except in copies such as the Utrecht Psalter, until Giotto’s circle in the fourteenth century restored natural settings. Early fifteenth-century Europe made landscape a genre behind religious narratives; luxury Books of Hours like the Très Riches Heures expanded month labors into weather and fields. “Hand G,” likely a Van Eyck, mastered light-fall and recession that others faked with window sills for another century.
Pure landscape drawings by Leonardo, Dürer, and Fra Bartolomeo arrive near 1500; painted pure landscapes follow with Altdorfer’s Danube School and, in the Low Countries, Gerard David’s triptych wings about 1510–15. Joachim Patinir’s high “world landscape,” perfected by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, reigned until Antwerp’s Small Landscapes (forty-eight prints, 1559 and 1561) dropped the eye to villages and estates—setting up seventeenth-century Dutch realism of light and weather. Claude Lorrain and Poussin in Rome kept classical or biblical staffage; Frans Post sold Brazilian scenes after 1636–1644 travels. Teaching aids multiplied too: David Cox’s 1813 watercolour treatise offered etchings from rudiments to finish, while distant traditions such as Nazca ceramics (180 BCE–500 CE) painted landscapes on vessels.
Source: Landscape painting
