A landscape painting is a picture whose subject is the land itself. For centuries in the West, the land only filled the space behind a saint or a prince.
Pure landscapes first appear in Europe around 1520, in small panels by Albrecht Altdorfer. Even then, they ranked low. In 1667, Louis XIV's court historian André Félibien placed landscape just above fruit and flowers.
With no hero and no story, a landscape painter had only the land, its light and its weather.
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How These Were Chosen
These pictures all clear at least one of three tests.
It changed how later painters handled the land. It drew crowds or prizes in its own day. Or it lives on far beyond the museum, on posters, screens and book covers.
Here are twelve famous landscape paintings, counted down from 12 to 1.
12. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)
A cypress rises along the left side of the canvas, dark green and taller than the church steeple. Behind it, the night sky rolls in spirals over a village and a line of blue hills. Each star sits inside a ring of yellow light.
Vincent van Gogh made it in June 1889, in the Provence town of Saint-Rémy. He had admitted himself to the Saint-Paul asylum there a few weeks earlier, after a series of breakdowns in Arles.
Part of the view was real. His bedroom window had iron bars and looked onto a walled field of wheat. Around the start of June, he described that view to his brother Theo.
He had watched the countryside from his window "a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The morning star was the planet Venus, and it is in the painting. The village is not.
No houses could be seen from his room. He painted the canvas by day, from memory and other views.
Everyone photographs the swirls. My advice is to look for Venus instead, the one light in that sky he really saw from his window before dawn.
Van Gogh said himself that he had bent the view out of shape. In his letters he called the picture simply the "Night effect." In September 1889 he listed it among his "exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement," with lines "contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts."
By late November he was harder on it. He wrote to Émile Bernard, a painter friend from his Paris years.
"Once again I'm allowing myself to do stars too big, &c., new setback, and I've enough of that." He went back to the olive groves, painting gray skies against yellow earth.
The canvas also reached Theo late. In September 1889, Van Gogh took it out of a roll of paintings bound for Paris. He also removed two other landscapes, a poppy field and a wheatfield under a rising moon.
Leaving the three out cut the carriage cost by 3.50 francs. They left separately on 28 September, with other canvases.
At a Glance
Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Painted: June 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
About This Painting
What did Theo van Gogh think of The Starry Night?
Theo van Gogh answered on 22 October 1889. He said he sensed what preoccupied his brother in "the village in the moonlight," but felt that "the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." He preferred the Irises, which he called "one of your good things."
How did The Starry Night end up at MoMA?
MoMA acquired The Starry Night in 1941, in exchange for works from the bequest of Lillie P. Bliss. Bliss was one of the museum's three founders.
What size is The Starry Night?
The Starry Night measures 73.7 by 92.1 cm, or 29 by 36¼ inches.
11. Claude Monet, Poppy Field (1873)
Red poppies cover a slope that runs down toward us from the left. At the bottom right, a woman holding a blue parasol wades through the tall grass beside a small boy in a straw hat.
A second woman and child walk along the top of the hill. Claude Monet painted the field in 1873, near Argenteuil on the Seine, where he was living at the time.