Joachim Patinir (c1480-1524) was a Flemish Northern Rennaissance history and landscape painter with a distinct style of panoramic northern Renaissance landscapes. Albert Durer was a friend of Patinir and called him “a good painter of landscapes”. This simple statement spoke a great deal as Patinir was a pioneer of landscape painting as an independent genre; he was the first Flemish painter to regard himself primarily as a landscape painter - someone that focussed on drawing and painting landscape in its own right rather than as a backdrop. Patinir’s immense vistas combine observation of naturalistic detail with fantasy. Patinir often let his landscapes dwarf his figures, making elements of his landscapes more spectacular than he would have seen in nature around him - and his figures were often painted by other artists!
Here is an example of Patinir’s work: The Flight into Egypt (Museum of Antwerp), oil on panel, created first half of 16th century. Note the very large rocks and the landscape features in the distance are painted with a green and blue palette to express the dimming caused by distance.
Source: Wikipedia
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Dürer was a major artist of the northern Renaissance. Born in 1471 in Nuremberg he first studied to be a goldsmith under his Father, but later turned to painting. Durer’s landscape watercolours are the earliest pure landscape studies to have survived in the history of Western art. They were made during his journey across the Alps when he travelled to Italy in 1495-6 and in the countryside around Nuremberg on his return. They were not made with particular compositions in mind, but together formed a stock of material to which Dürer referred when he designed background detail in his later prints and paintings. Source: British Museum – Dürer, The British Museum Press
Dürer's practice of making studies from nature in watercolour and the use of extensive landscape backgrounds in his finished works played a further part in the development of landscape as a subject in its own right.
Albrecht Dürer, Landscape with a Woodland Pool, a drawing painted with a brush in watercolour and bodycolour
It is generally agreed that the above landscape drawing by Dürer is one of the most sensitive of his portrayals of nature. Dürer was the first artist to recognize the potential of watercolour. Indeed, his work as a landscape artist in watercolour raised the status of this medium.
The scene above may be outside Nuremberg and was probably painted after Dürer had returned from his first visit to Italy, around 1496-97. The drawing is unfinished at lower right where the white of the paper is clearly visible. Dürer's monogram in the upper centre was added later in another hand.
Claude Lorraine (born Claude Gellée c. 1600 or 1604/5)
Claude Lorraine was born in France, in the village of Chamagne near Nancy in the then independent Duchy of Lorraine. In about 1617, after the death of his parents, he travelled with a relative to Rome where he studied painting through apprentiships. Claude spent most of the rest of his life in Italy. Claude’s work had a significant influence on the future of British landscape art, not least because he was a great influence on both J.M.W.Turner and John Constable.
By 1630 Claude's career as an independent landscape artist painter in Rome was flourishing. By 1640 Claude was the most commercially successful landscape painter in Europe, and he remained so for the rest of his life. From about 1600 Bolognese artists working in Rome and producing large-scale figure paintings, were painting more serene landscapes than had been seen before. They were more restrained in form and colour and more balanced in composition, to serve as a frame for the human action depicted within it. This style became a model for landscapists working in Italy at that time, including Claude, and for the rest of the century.
Claude has been consistently praised since his own day, as a painter of landscape and a painter of the effects of light. He was also highly regarded for the fact that he wasn't just a painter of landscapes but also a painter of stories, or histories as they were called. In his day, great regard was given to painters who didn't only copy from nature but also used their imaginations to include in their paintings a story. This required the use of the painters imagination and additional mastery of painting human and animal forms, in action and with expression, within the landscape. Though Claude incorporated figures in his landscapes, from his surviving drawings it seems he was less interested in the rendering of the human form than the effects of light.
Claude took his inspiration from the Bible and the classical poetry of Ovid and Virgil. "Claude's landscapes cannot be seen simply as enchanting views. They are peopled with gods, saints and heroes, and provide an idealised setting for incidents from myth, history and the Bible which may often have carried special associations for Claude's aristocratic patrons."...Source : Claude The Poetic Landscape, National Gallery Publications
A work by Claude:
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976)
A British artist well known for his drawings and paintings of life (both industrial and urban landscapes) in the north of England in the 1920s/30s.
Lowry developed his own distinctive way of painting and drawing his subject matter, being the life and scenes that were around him in his everyday life. This article below written by Bernard Taylor in The Guardian newspaper is a review of one of Lowry’s earliest exhibitions and says a lot about Lowry’s personal style:
"Mr Laurence S Lowry has a very interesting and individual outlook. His subjects are Manchester and Lancashire street scenes, interpreted with technical means as yet imperfect, but with real imagination... We hear a great deal nowadays about recovering the simplicity of vision of primitives in art. These pictures are authentically primitive, the real thing not an artificially cultivated likeness to it. The problems of representation are solved not by reference to established conventions, but by sheer determination to express what the artist has felt, whether the result is according to rule or not..."
Lowry’s style has been referred to as ‘naïve’ as well as ‘primitive’. It seems Lowry struggled with his subject, finding drawings as hard to do as paintings. He would do many sketches from life and then compose his pictures in a 'painting' room at home. He frequently gathered various elements from a number of different studies to construct a composite that captured the essence of the scene he was attempting to create.
Lowry himself said ‘A country landscape is fine without people, but an industrial set without people is an empty shell. A street is not a street without people … it is as dead as mutton’
Lowry worked in oils with a limited range of colours and on close inspection his paintings show he would work the paint with both ends of the brush his fingers and sticks and nails.
Though Lowry had a recognisable style of crowds of simple dark figures (matchstick men ..), it is said that after his mother died his feelings of isolation and loneliness were reflected in the changing subjects for his paintings such as derelict buildings and wastelands. He apparently said of his work from the 1950s onwards – “Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened” It depicted deserted landscapes and seascapes and solitary figures/down and outs.
A Lowry
Notes based on a BBC2 documentary about J M W Turner (birth date unknown. Baptised 1775, died 1851)
Like Lowry, Turner focused on the industrial landscape, but rather than depict that landscape on his doorstep he sought to depict the advances of the industrial revolution. Innovation at that time. Unlike other artists who lamented the changing landscape, he sought to depict advances in industry and understanding in science and include it in his art as a thing of beauty just as much as the inate beauty of the natural landscape that it was changing.
His paintings provided a visual story of the industrial revolution and he reveals a sublime beauty in the changing face of Britain – celebrating it and not seeing it as the advancing enemy which would forever change the natural landscape.
Turner also used paint in a way that had not been done before in order to create the effects in his paintings that he wanted. Mixing his own colours and thickly daubing paint onto the canvas in contrast to the very fine painting that had till then been seen in the Royal Academy.
Fishermen at Sea, 1796, Oil on canvas
The first oil painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy
The first oil painting Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy
