During the early years of the 17th century a group of Bolgnese artists, lead by Annibale Carracci (1560 - 1609), moved to Rome and formed the nucleus of a prolific and successful school of Bolognese painters. This group formulated a programme of idealizing and 'beautifying' nature, according to the standards set by classical statues.
The greatest of these 'academic' masters was the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), who made Rome his adopted home. Poussin studied the classical statues with passionate zeal, because he wanted their beauty to help him convey his vision of bygone lands of innocence and dignity. His pictures show calm sunny southern landscapes. Beautiful young men and fair and dignified young woman, representing shepherds and companion nymphs gather around ancient tombs and ruined temples.
It is for the same mood of nostalgic beauty that the works of another Italianized Frenchman became famous. He was Claude Lorrain (1600-82), some seven years younger than Poussin. Lorrain studied the landscape of the Roman Campagna, the plains and hills round Rome with their lovely southern hues and their majestic reminders of a great past. Like Poussin, he showed in his sketches that he was a perfect master of realistic representation of nature, and his studies of trees are a joy to look at. But for his finished pictures and etchings, he selected only such motifs as he considered worthy of a place in a dreamlike vision of the past, and he suffused it in a golden light or a silvery blue air which appear to transfigure the whole scene.
It was Claude who first opened people's eyes to the sublime beauty of nature, and for nearly a century after his death travellers used to judge a piece of real scenery according to his standards. If it reminded them of his visions, they called it beautiful and sat down to picnic there. Rich Englishmen went even farther and decided to model the piece of nature they owned, in their parks on their estates, on Claude's dreams of beauty. In this way, many a piece of English countryside should really bear the signature of the French painter who settled in Italy and made the programme of the Carracci his own.
One often associates Dutch seventeenth-century art with individuals and groups of people in a mood of gaiety and good living, which is well exemplified in Jan Steen's pictures. But there are other artists in Holland who represent a very different mood. The outstanding example is the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael (1628 ?-82). Ruisdael was about the same age as Jan Steen which means that he belonged to the second generation of great Dutch painters. When he grew up the works of Rembrandt were already famous and were bound to influence his taste and choice of themes. During the first half of his life he lived in the beautiful town of Haarlem, which is separated from the sea by a range of wooded dunes. He loved to study the effect of light and shade on the gnarled salt pruned trees of these tracts and specialized more and more in picturesque forest scenes. He became a master in the painting of dark and sombre clouds, of evening light when the shadows grow, of ruined castles and rushing brooks; in short it was he who discovered the poetry of the northern landscape much as Claude had discovered the poetry of Italian scenery. Perhaps no artist before him had contrived to express so much of his own feelings and moods through their reflection in nature.
The 'Grand Tour' describes the
lengthy visit to Rome via Venice and Florence made by young English aristocrats
in the 18th century, ostensibly to complete his education through studying art
and architecture. Souvenirs of travel, such as 'old master' paintings of the
Italian countryside. At home,
aniquaries studied topographical engravings which illustrated learned journals
showing ruined abbeys, castles and other relics of ancient times. These pictures
feed an antiquarian tradition of admiring and recording ancient sites and the
customary educated admirer's response to ruins of reflecting on the transient
nature of all man's worldly achievements.This burgeoned into leisure travel from
the late 18th century. Aesthetic theories of ‘The Picturesque’ helped the
touirist to evaluate a view by the degree to which it resembled a landscape
painting by the 17th-century painters such as Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas
Poussin. This opened up
connoisseurship, whether of art, architecture or landscapes, from the educated
aristocracy and gentry to a growing middle-class market at a time when national
consciousness and pride was rising among the English. Dutch engravers and landscape painters
where hired to depict English country houses and estates. Artists also illustrating treatises or
travel books, producing topographical prospects of English towns, country houses
or even factories to order.
The expansion of the popular press in the 18th century made travel books and engravings after artists' views of sites and prospects available to a much wider audience. The Society of Dilettanti and others sponsored archaeologists and architects to explore and record lost ruins in Greece and Asia Minor for publication in the most luxurious of books; at the same time pocket-size 'companions' could aid the local amateur historian.
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