When European art began to elaborate the religious conceptions with which it was in early times mainly concerned, landscapes were introduced as part of the Bible stories. But they were purely subordinate. Duccio and Giotto use conventionalised trees and strange bare rocks which, while evidence of wonderful vision, show no sense of the value of landscape for itself. The delicate distances of the Flemish primitives, the backgrounds of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes, the settings of Cinquecento Madonnas, are merely so much design to fill a space, so many accessories to the figures in the foreground. One would like to except Patinir’s ‘Flight into Egypt,’[2] where the thicket behind the Virgin has more than a merely decorative significance, and shows a loving study of trees and rocks, were not the vistas to left and right pure design. There are also rare landscape studies of Dürer—one particularly, an unfinished study of hills in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford—which are strikingly ahead of their time in their sole preoccupation with nature as distinct from humanity.
But it is really with Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century art that landscape for landscape’s sake makes its appearance, with Rubens, Rembrandt, Koninck, van Goyen. However, to them mountains are as accessory as was nature generally for their predecessors. To give composition, to round off a landscape, to frame a vista, Rubens and the great Dutchmen used hills and crags. There are probably many exceptions to this generalisation. To mention one only, there is a picture by the Flemish Millet (1642-1679) at Munich in which a mountain occupies the centre of the canvas. This mountain, though tree-covered, forms the main element in the painting, and despite the presence of allegorical figures in the foreground, is proof of a curiously modern interest in hill-formation. In the main, however, the contention is true that the mountain in art does not appear in the seventeenth century.
The landscape tradition passed to Claude, and then forked. One branch, the English, produced Wilson, Crome, Constable, Turner, and the water-colourists. To the other belongs Poussin, and through him the Barbizon school in France. (It should here be noticed, at the risk of anticipating, that this last-named group derived from Bonington a large share of Constable’s influence, and owe perhaps the greater part of their inspiration to English sources.)
Traces now begin to appear of a love of mountains for themselves. Crome’s ‘Slate Quarries,’ some of Wilson’s Welsh pictures, many of Turner’s sketches, show rocks and hills painted for their own grandeur and beauty. Similarly, in much of Corot’s early work—before 1830—bare mountain-sides and wastes of rock stand unadorned by trees or other counter-interests.
Of Constable we are told that ‘the grandeur of hills weighed on him. He wanted meadows,’[3] but Plate III. in the book from which this quotation is taken shows that he possessed a very real understanding of mountains.
The recognition proved only momentary, and was soon lost in conventional trickery. In England the water-colourists began once more to use mountains merely to break the level of a landscape, to give a pleasing variety. The idea of depicting them solely for themselves becomes actually abhorrent. An extract from William Gilpin’s Essays on Landscape-painting will show the attitude which became general to the early English school:—
‘In landscape-painting smooth objects would produce no composition at all. In a mountain scene what composition could arise from one smooth knoll coming forward on one side, intersected by a smooth knoll on the other, with a smooth plain perhaps in the middle and a smooth mountain in the distance? The very idea is disgusting.’[4]
To prove the awful result he reproduces a drawing in his book done on these very lines, a drawing so superior to all the other illustrations in the volume as to show how utterly tastes have changed and advanced since his time.
Again:—