5.1 Among the outpouring of magnificent artworks generated during the Renaissance, Nature had featured frequently: as a background in which to set the human focus, as an accompaniment, as an adornment to demonstrate the Artist’s skill, or as an illustration of some biblical story or Greek myth. Nature itself, and Nature alone, never took centre stage as subject worthy of representing. Man’s relationship with Nature was not so important.

5.2 Landscape Painting did not exist as a form of art. Why would one want to paint a picture solely of a view of a natural landscape, let alone just one element of the natural world? And even if it were painted, who would want to hang it on their wall, or come to see it in a gallery? How could there be anything beautiful or worthy in Nature itself?

5.3 The Tate Gallery summarises as follows: “The appreciation of nature for its own sake, and its choice as a specific subject for art, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the seventeenth century landscape was confined to the background of portraits or paintings dealing principally with religious, mythological or historical subjects.”

5.4 In the work of the seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin, the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects that were the ostensible basis for the work. Their treatment of landscape however was highly stylised or artificial: they tried to evoke the landscape of classical Greece and Rome and their work became known as classical landscape. At the same time Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael were developing a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting, based on what they saw around them.

5.6 When, also in the seventeenth century, the French Academy classified the genres of art, it placed landscape fourth in order of importance out of five genres. Nevertheless, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century, although the classical idea predominated. The nineteenth century, however, saw a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting, partly driven it seems by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God, and partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialisation and urbanisation. Britain produced two outstanding contributors to this phenomenon in John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. 

5.7 The baton then passed to France where, in the hands of the impressionists, landscape painting became the vehicle for a revolution in Western painting (modern art) and the traditional hierarchy of the genres collapsed.

5.8 In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited his sitter's rolling acres; the English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England. In the 18th century, watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works, and a large number of amateur painters

5.9 By the beginning of the 19th century the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscapists, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer. However all these had difficulty establishing themselves in the contemporary art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits.

5.10 In Europe, as John Ruskin said, and Sir Kenneth Clark confirmed, landscape painting was the "chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century", and "the dominant art", with the result that in the following period people were "apt to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity"^, In Clark's analysis, underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches: the acceptance of descriptive symbols, a curiosity about the facts of nature, the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature, and the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.

5.11 The Romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art, and remote and wild landscapes, which had been one recurring element in earlier landscape art, now became more prominent. The German Caspar David Friedrich had a distinctive style, influenced by his Danish training, where a distinct national style, drawing on the Dutch 17th-century example, had developed. To this he added a quasi-mystical Romanticism.

5.12 French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other painters in the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that would become the most influential in Europe for a century, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for the first time making landscape painting the main source of general stylistic innovation across all types of painting.

5.13 Paul Cabaud (1817 - 1895) was one of a group of painters, along with Dunant, Salabert and Loppé most attached to painting landscapes of Annecy and its surroundings.

5.14 The nationalism of the new United Provinces had been a factor in the popularity of Dutch 17th-century landscape painting and in the 19th century, as other nations attempted to develop distinctive national schools of painting, the attempt to express the special nature of the landscape of the homeland became a general tendency. In Russia, as in America, the gigantic size of paintings was itself a nationalist statement.

5.15 In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late 19th century, is probably the best-known native development in landscape art. These painters created works of mammoth scale that attempted to capture the epic scope of the landscapes that inspired them. The work of Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, has much in common with the philosophical ideals of European landscape paintings — a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature.

5.16 As Landscape painting established the wide vistas of Nature, so the individual detail of Nature came into focus. John James Audubon (1785 – 1851) was an American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a colour-plate book entitled The Birds of America (1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon identified 25 new species.

5.17 Audubon was born in Les Cayes in the French colony of Saint-Domingue(now Haiti) on his father's sugarcane plantation. He was the son of Lieutenant Jean Audubon, a French naval officer (and privateer) from the south of Brittany and his mistress Jeanne Rabine, a 27-year-old chambermaid from Les Touches, Brittany. They named the boy Jean Rabin.

5.18 The senior Audubon had commanded ships. During the American Revolution, he had been imprisoned by Britain. After his release, he helped the American cause. He had long worked to save money and secure his family's future with real estate. Due to slave unrest in the Caribbean, in 1789 he sold part of his plantation in Saint-Domingue and purchased a 284-acre farm called Mill Grove, 20 miles from Philadelphia, to diversify his investments. Increasing tension in Saint-Domingue between the colonists and the African slaves, who greatly outnumbered them, convinced Jean Audubon to return to France, where he became a member of the Republican Guard. In 1791 he arranged for his natural children Jean and Muguet, who was majority-white in ancestry, to be transported and delivered to him in France and so the children were raised in Couëron, near Nantes, France, by Audubon and his French wife. When Audubon, at age 18, boarded ship in 1803 to immigrate to the United States, he changed his name to an anglicized form: John James Audubon.

5.19 From his earliest days, John James Audubon had an affinity for birds. "I felt an intimacy with them...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life."His father encouraged his interest in nature: He would point out the elegant movement of the birds, and the beauty and softness of their plumage. He called my attention to their show of pleasure or sense of danger, their perfect forms and splendid attire. He would speak of their departure and return with the seasons.

5.20 In France during the chaotic years of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the younger Audubon grew up to be a handsome and gregarious man. He played flute and violin, and learned to ride, fence, and dance. A great walker, he loved roaming in the woods, often returning with natural curiosities, including birds' eggs and nests, of which he made crude drawings.

5.21 On returning to America to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s army, he traveled to the Audubon family farm Mill Grove, on the Perkiomen Creek a few miles from Valley Forge. Later, after a short stay in Cincinnati to work as a naturalist and taxidermist at a museum, Audubon traveled south on the Mississippi with his gun, paintbox, and assistant Joseph Mason, and painted the plant life backgrounds of many of Audubon's bird studies. He was committed to find and paint all the birds of North America for eventual publication. His goal was to surpass the earlier ornithological work of poet-naturalist Alexander Wilson. Though he could not afford to buy Wilson's work, Audubon used it to guide him when he had access to a copy.

5.22 On October 12, 1820, Audubon traveled with George Lehman, a professional Swiss landscape artist. The following summer, he moved upriver to the Oakley Plantation in Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where he taught drawing to Eliza Pirrie, the young daughter of the owners. Though low-paying, the job was ideal, as it afforded him much time to roam and paint in the woods. (The plantation has been preserved as the Audubon State Historic Site, and is located at 11788 Highway 965, between Jackson and St. Francisville.)

5.23 Audubon called his future work Birds of America. He attempted to paint one page each day. Painting with newly discovered technique, he decided his earlier works were inferior and re-did them. He hired hunters to gather specimens for him. Audubon realized the ambitious project would take him away from his family for months at a time.

5.24 In 1824, Audubon returned to Philadelphia to seek a publisher for his bird drawings. Though he met Thomas Sully, one of the most famous portrait painters of the time and a valuable ally, Audubon was rebuffed for publication. He had earned the enmity of some of the city's leading scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He took oil painting lessons from Sully and met Charles Bonaparte, who admired his work and recommended he go to Europe to have his bird drawings engraved.

5.25 With his wife's support, in 1826 at age 41, Audubon took his growing collection of work to England. He sailed from New Orleans to Liverpool on the cotton hauling ship Delos, reaching England in the autumn of 1826 with his portfolio of over 300 drawings. With letters of introduction to prominent Englishmen, Audubon gained their quick attention. "I have been received here in a manner not to be expected during my highest enthusiastic hopes."

5.26 The British could not get enough of his images of backwoods America and its natural attractions. He met with great acceptance as he toured around England and Scotland, and was lionized as "the American woodsman." He raised enough money to begin publishing his Birds of America. This monumental work consists of 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints of 497 bird species, made from engraved copper plates of various sizes depending on the size of the image. They were printed on sheets measuring about 39 by 26 inches (660 mm).The work contains slightly more than 700 North American bird species.

5.27 The cost of printing the entire work was $115,640 (over $2,000,000 today), paid for from advance subscriptions, exhibitions, oil painting commissions, and animal skins, which Audubon hunted and sold. Audubon's great work was a remarkable accomplishment. It took more than 14 years of field observations and drawings, plus his single-handed management and promotion of the project to make it a success. A reviewer wrote,

“All anxieties and fears which overshadowed his work in its beginning had passed away. The prophecies of kind but over-prudent friends, who did not understand his self-sustaining energy, had proved untrue; the malicious hope of his enemies, for even the gentle lover of nature has enemies, had been disappointed; he had secured a commanding place in the respect and gratitude of men.^”

5.28 And so the son of a French Privateer who had fought the English for the American cause, having left France to avoid conscription, and having found no support in his adopted America, eventually found respect, fame and fortune in England. It was to be in his honour that the American equivalent of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was to be named, but that is the subject of a later chapter.

5.29 A revolution had been achieved to establish landscapes alone as worthy of painting, without human figures or their manufactures to focus the viewers interest. These landscapes were impressive for the vast amount of detail they captured, the complexity of the scene and the contrasts between individual features. But the revolution in Man’s appreciation of the beauty of Nature continued to forge ahead.

5.30 Perhaps the apotheosis of this growing artistic acceptance of Nature alone as a subject worthy of painting, and the finest example of focusing upon detail to reveal previously overlooked, radiant beauty, is a painting of nothing more than a few flowers. No human interest. No background. No historical setting. No apparent great variety or complexity. Nothing exotic or even out of the ordinary. Just a few commonplace flowers visible to all, and ignored by all, since time immemorial – now seen for the very first time by a man confined to an asylum for the insane at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the year before his death.

5.31 In 1987, Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises became the most expensive painting ever sold, and is now on display for all to see at the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California.

5.32 One further, significant contribution towards opening the eyes of the world to the beauty of Nature, was a set of prints produced around the turn of the twentieth century, some ten years after Van Gogh’s death.

5.33 Haeckel’s sets of portraits of microbial life – how one man combined science and art to influence how we see the Natural world – in this case to focus on detail not that we have ignored, as with the Irises, but detail we are not able to see without a microscope.

5.34 And so it could be fairly argued that through the invention of landscape painting, some three hundred years ago, Art  has had some significant influence upon the way Nature is appreciated by Mankind, not just for its utility, but for its beauty.