Famous Landscape Paintings

What landscape painting is

Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction in painting of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, a landscape background for figures can still form an important part of the picture. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and they develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. That is why landscape art arrives late in European art and then takes over. Many of the landscape artists gathered here were born into a world that ranked the genre below history painting, and they changed that ranking by sheer weight of good work.

Famous landscape paintings

These are the landscape paintings people name first, and each can be ordered as a hand-painted oil reproduction.

• The Hay Wain, originally titled Landscape: Noon, completed in 1821. It shows a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex, hangs in the National Gallery in London, and is regarded as Constable's most famous image and one of the quintessential paintings of the Romantic movement.
• The Starry Night, an oil on canvas painted in June 1889, and the label most people use is simply The Starry Night, 1889; it is the one picture in the store that needs no introduction. It shows the view from the east-facing window of van Gogh's asylum room at Saint-Remy-de-Provence just before sunrise, with an imaginary village added, and it has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.
• Impression, sunrise, an 1872 canvas first shown at what became known as the Exhibition of the Impressionists in Paris in April 1874. The painting is credited with inspiring the name of the movement.
• The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog of 1818. It shows a man standing on a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer, gazing out on a landscape covered in thick fog through which other ridges, trees and mountains pierce.
• The Voyage of Life: Youth, from the series of four paintings Thomas Cole created in 1840 as an allegory of the four stages of human life. In each one a voyager travels by boat on the River of Life with a guardian angel, and the landscape, reflecting one of the four seasons, carries the story. In Youth the boy takes control of the boat and aims for a shining castle in the sky.
• Rain, Steam and Speed, Turner's Great Western Railway subject, where weather and speed do more work than the train.
• The Japanese Bridge, the water lily pond at Giverny that Monet returned to for the rest of his life.
• Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, oil on canvas, 73.5 by 112 centimeters, now in the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels. It was long thought to be by Pieter Bruegel the Elder; after technical examination in 1996 the attribution is regarded as doubtful and the picture is usually seen as an early copy of a lost original, though the composition can be said with certainty to be his.
• Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun, one of at least 15 paintings of olive trees van Gogh produced, mostly at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in 1889, where he lived at an asylum at his own request and painted the gardens and, when allowed outside the walls, the nearby olive trees, cypresses and wheat fields.
• West Point, Prout's Neck and Camp Fire by Winslow Homer, two American scenes from opposite ends of the day, and Harvest at La Crau, with Montmajour in the Background, painted in the flat glare of a Provencal summer.
• At the seashore by Volodymyr Orlovsky and The Half Way House, Thatcham by William Shayer, two quieter works for a smaller wall, and many people start there rather than with a famous name.
• The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, a landscape with a single animal carrying the whole meaning.

The painters who made the genre

• J.M.W. Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic artist. He worked to elevate the status of landscape painting and is considered a precursor of Impressionism, and he kept a habit of going out to paint the same view twice and one of the greatest and most influential British painters.
• Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism, seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. He was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting.
• Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic and anti-classical work conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. His pictures set contemplative human figures against dark skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins.
• Thomas Cole was an Anglo-American artist who founded the Hudson River School movement. He painted romantic landscapes and history paintings, was inspired by European artists but had a strong American sensibility, and worked primarily with oil on canvas.
• Albert Bierstadt was a German-American artist best known for his monumental landscapes that glorified the American West.
• Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist whose work introduced new modes of representation and formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th-century Cubism. His Mont Sainte-Victoire subjects are the most painted mountain in art history.

Kinds of landscape in this collection

The grid splits by what is in the view. There are river and valley scenes, like The Hay Wain on the Stour. There are mountain views: Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California, an 1868 canvas measuring 72 by 120 inches, was created at his studio in Rome, exhibited throughout Europe, and is now a centerpiece of the 19th-century landscape holdings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. There are winter scenes; The Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 oil on wood by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, belongs to a series on the times of the year and is set in the depths of winter. There are cityscapes across water, popular in the Netherlands at the time, which according to art historian Emma Barker celebrated the city and its trade; Vermeer's View of Delft is the best known and his only cityscape. And there is the classical pastoral: Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego of 1637 to 1638 shows idealized shepherds from antiquity around an austere tomb.

Trees, sky and water carry most of the mood. A bare tree against a morning mist is a Romantic picture; the same tree in flat noon sun is a Realist one. Spring blossom, high summer and deep winter each change the style of a place as much as the painter does, and many buyers pick these artworks by season rather than by school, which is a perfectly good way to paint a room, matching the hour in the canvas to the hour in the room. The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings Thomas Cole created between 1833 and 1836, uses one river valley and one boulder on a crag through five stages of an imaginary city, which some critics read as a contrast between the immutability of the earth and the transience of man. John Constable worked the other way around, painting one small scene near his home until it became the most English picture there is.

Landscape by period

• Renaissance art emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400 and took classical antiquity as its foundation, transformed by contemporary scientific knowledge. For art historians it marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the Early Modern age.
• Baroque and the 17th century gave the Dutch their harbour views and their flat horizons, and the Baroque cultural movement carried landscape into Protestant states across Western Europe as well as Catholic ones.
• Romanticism originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century to advocate for subjectivity, imagination and the appreciation of nature, in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. This is Friedrich, Constable and Turner country.
• Realism is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality or exaggeration; as a movement it began in France after the revolution of 1848 and the realist painters rejected Romanticism.
• Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition and an emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, with ordinary subject matter and unusual visual angles. It came out of a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s.
• Post-Impressionism developed roughly between 1886 and 1905 as a reaction against the Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and color, and its principal artists were Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.

Browse related collections

Landscape splits into smaller subjects, and most people arrive looking for one of them.

• Seascapes and coastal views for water instead of land.
• Trees in oil for orchards, poplars and single trees.
• Mountain views for peaks, passes and high ground.
• Forest scenes for woodland light.
• Rivers and valleys for the water that runs through them.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a painting a landscape? The main subject is a wide view of natural scenery, such as mountains, valleys, rivers, trees and forests, arranged into a coherent composition. Sky is almost always part of the view and weather is often part of the composition, and the natural beauty of the place is the point rather than the excuse. When the scenery is only a background for figures, it is still a meaningful part of the work but not a landscape proper.

Are these prints? No. Each one is an original oil on canvas, painted by hand by a studio artist working from the museum image, so the brushwork and the texture are real. Nothing on this page is printed, and nothing became a print on its way to you.

Which size works best for a landscape? A wide view usually wants width, so most buyers go one size up from their first instinct. Seven sizes are available with an optional frame, and you approve a photo of the finished canvas before it ships. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply.