LANDSCAPE PAINTING: Artists Who Love the Land

Introduction

How does an artist create a landscape? A landscape artist is a kind of magician who can create an entire world on a flat piece of canvas. That world is made only of paint. Trees that seem thick with leaves come from just a few flicks of a brush. Shining lakes, splashing waterfalls, grasses bending in the wind, and dark clouds that threaten rain—all of it comes from color squeezed out of a tube. It's remarkable that small dabs and smears of paint can create places our imaginations can visit: a calm river winding around hills, a rocky shore where we can almost hear the waves crash, or a huge canyon that seems to stretch for miles into the distance.

If an artist thinks there are too many trees on a hill, he can leave some out of the picture. If he thinks the trees are in the wrong spot, he can move them. If a riverbank looks too bare, he can add rocks that were never really there.

A landscape artist also has to decide what she wants viewers to notice. If she's painting a field, should we see each individual blade of grass, or should the field appear as a blur of color? She might paint the landscape as if we were looking down from an airplane, or as if we were lying on a picnic blanket looking straight ahead.

Before making any of these choices, the artist must first decide whether to work outdoors, directly on the land, or indoors, in a studio. Working outdoors lets an artist observe nature's colors—the soil, the clouds, the reflections on water—and study how sunlight and shadow shift moment by moment. Working in a studio allows for slower, more careful work: rearranging the composition and adjusting colors and shapes according to the artist's own vision. Many artists use both methods, sketching outdoors and then completing the actual painting later in the studio.

Air is also an essential part of any landscape, even though we rarely think about it. An artist must paint the air so skillfully that we seem to feel the sun's heat or the rush of wind. She has to convince us that it might take a bird hours to fly across the picture. This is difficult, since no paint tube is labeled "sunshine," "frosty air," "gentle breeze," or "gloomy day." The artist must create wind, sunlight, and mist using only the paint at the end of her brush.

It's important to remember that a landscape artist is not a camera, simply recording whatever appears in front of a lens. An artist is not required to paint exactly what he sees. If a hillside has too many trees, he can leave some out. If the trees seem misplaced, he can rearrange them. If a riverbank looks empty, he can add rocks that don't actually exist there.

Creating Illusions

No matter where a landscape artist sets up an easel, she must solve one central problem shared by all landscape painting: creating the illusion of deep space on a flat canvas. When done skillfully, the effect is spellbinding—we feel we could step into the painting and keep walking for miles.

Landscape artists rely on certain techniques that reliably create this illusion. Here are five "space tricks" students can try themselves:

1. A winding path. A path or river that winds from the front of the picture (the foreground) to the back (the background) convinces us the picture holds real depth.

1. Changes in size. A tree close to us looks much larger than an identical tree far away.

1. Overlap. A boulder nearby overlaps and partly hides a much larger cliff behind it.

1. Changes in clarity. A distant mountain range looks hazier and less sharp than a mountain nearby.

1. Diagonal composition. Land that recedes from us along a diagonal line appears to stretch back into the distance.

Four American artists—George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer—used these techniques masterfully. Their goal wasn't merely to trick the eye, but to capture the vastness and beauty of the American landscape.

Catlin, Moran, and Bierstadt were artist-explorers drawn west by the raw power of unexplored rivers, mountains, and canyons. They joined geological and surveying expeditions into territories that were, at the time, uncharted by American settlers, creating a visual record of the land through their paintings. Homer, by contrast, preferred the East Coast; his passion was the rocky Atlantic shoreline of Maine.

All four painters helped Americans see and appreciate their own country during an era before photography was common and long before travel films existed. Today, television surrounds us with images, and we can easily travel by car, train, or plane to almost any river, mountain, canyon, or coastline we choose. Yet the quiet paintings these artists created still convey the grandeur of the American landscape.

Through the study of several artworks, this issue of Art to Zoo explores how Americans felt about their expanding nation during the era of westward expansion, up through the end of the nineteenth century. It introduces students to basic principles of landscape painting and gives them practice with geography skills, helping them appreciate the physical features of different regions of the United States. All the paintings discussed here belong to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.

About the Artists

George Catlin
George Catlin, an easterner, had been fascinated by Native Americans since he was a boy. At age thirty-four, he decided that painting Native American life would be far more interesting than practicing law. So in 1830, he headed west. For six years, he traveled from village to village along the Missouri River, painting portraits of tribal chiefs as well as scenes of buffalo hunts, dances, and other Native American ceremonies.

Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran was an eastern artist who loved joining geological expeditions, even though he wasn't particularly rugged. He traveled to the remote headwaters of the Yellowstone River in Wyoming, and two years later visited the Grand Canyon, sketching it repeatedly from an overlook known as "Powell's Plateau." Back in his eastern studio, he combined ideas from his small sketches into enormous finished paintings. By then, Moran had built a strong reputation as an artist, and his stunning watercolors of Yellowstone helped convince Congress, in 1872, to name it the nation's first national park.

Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt traveled to California in 1859 with a land-surveying team, at a time when the gold rush had captured the nation's curiosity. Back then, easterners could learn about California's wilderness only through small black-and-white photographs brought home by surveyors. But Bierstadt had a sharp business sense: he understood that if he created large, dramatic "great pictures" of California's scenery, easterners would pay to see them.

Winslow Homer
In 1893, Winslow Homer left his busy life in New York and built a studio in an old stable on the high shore of Prout's Neck, Maine, just a few hundred feet from the ocean. He loved walking along the cliffs during fierce storms, studying how the surf crashed against the rocks. On calmer days, though, he had little interest in the water—when the ocean was still, he thought it looked like nothing more than "a duck pond."

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Lesson Plan, Step 1

Views of the American West: True or False?

Objectives

• To understand that a landscape painting may or may not accurately depict a real place.
• To identify techniques that create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

Materials

• Copies of Activity Pages 1A–1D
• Pens or pencils
• A map of the western United States

Subjects: Art, geography, U.S. history

Procedure

1. Give each student a copy of Activity Pages 1A–1C, which show three views of the American West. After a few minutes of studying the images, ask: Which painting was created outdoors? Which was painted indoors, in a studio, based on outdoor sketches? Which painting depicts a place outside the United States?

1. Introduce students to River Bluffs, 1,320 Miles above St. Louis by George Catlin, shown on Activity Page 1A.

A. Ask students to describe the painting. Make sure they notice the winding river with scattered islands; the cone-shaped hills, called "bluffs"; the Native American man in the scene; the lack of trees; the absence of buildings or roads; and the wide, open sky.

B. Using a map of the western United States, locate the roughly two-thousand-mile stretch of the Missouri River between Fort Union, North Dakota, and St. Louis, Missouri. Estimate where the point "1,320 miles above St. Louis" would fall. Explain that before trains and cars existed, traveling by boat along the Missouri River was one of the only ways to reach the West—and that Native American villages, fur-trading posts, and forts were built along its banks.

C. Refer back to the "About the Artists" section to introduce George Catlin. Have students read his own description (on Activity Page 1A) of how he painted River Bluffs, 1,320 Miles above St. Louis. Ask them what his words reveal that the black-and-white reproduction of the painting alone cannot show.

D. Read Space Trick 1 aloud to students:

SPACE TRICK 1: Catlin uses a winding river to lead the eye into deep space.

Ask students to place a finger on the river in the picture's lower-left corner—the closest part, called the foreground. Have them trace the river with their finger until reaching the islands—the middleground. Finally, have them follow the river as far back as it goes—the background. Then have them trace the bumpy line where the tops of the bluffs meet the sky. This is called the horizon line, the farthest point the eye can see.

E. Read Space Trick 2 aloud:

SPACE TRICK 2: Catlin makes objects in the foreground larger than objects in the background.

Have students compare the height of the bluffs in the foreground to the height of those in the background. Explain that Catlin varied their size deliberately to create the illusion of depth. Then ask students to measure the height of the man in the painting and draw a second figure the exact...