Description

This book presents a new look at landscape painting in the nineteenth century as it transformed from the depiction of known places to explorations of mood and time passing. Masterpieces in oil and watercolor illustrate the genre from its predominance in Britain to extraordinary manifestations in France, Germany and the rest of Europe. Turner to Monet shows the spread of landscape painting to new territories where European artists in Australia, Asia and the Americas extended the Western tradition.

In the new worlds of Australia and North America, the land itself became a heroic character in the pictorial narrative. Vast skies of crystalline air, dramatic sunsets, expansive plains and valleys all emphasise the size of the continents. Increasingly, humans are shown in modern surroundings, the all-enveloping city in which nature seems controlled. In the last decades of the century, artists used the genre of landscape to experiment with colour and form, and so questioned the nature of painting itself .

Works by the finest artists of the time--Turner, Constable, Friedrich, Corot, Courbet, Glover, Von Guérard, Church, Streeton, Roberts, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Mone--are included, from public and private collections in Australia and around the world.