Chronicle the rise of the Romantic landscape in Western art

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Landscape painting originated as an independent genre not in the West, but in the East, in China, Japan, and other parts of East Asia. In Europe, it was not until the Renaissance—among such painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, and Brueghel— that the natural landscape became a subject in its own right. Rather than realistic depictions of nature, Romantic landscape paintings became a primary vehicle for the expression of an artist's shifting moods and private emotions. Romantic painters would translate their native affection for the countryside into scenes that ranged from the picturesque to the sublime.
English artists, such as John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, took the lead in the genesis of the Romantic landscape. Turner, especially, invested nature with theatrical fervor. Capturing the Romantic essence, Turner's works portrayed natural disasters and catastrophes that expressed the "sublime" and the terror human beings experience in the face of nature's overpowering forces. French landscape artists offered a bit gentler of an experience. They painted modest landscapes and scenes of rural life; unsentimental views of the local countryside.