A landscape painting is a picture whose main subject is the natural world: land, sky, water, mountains and trees.
People and buildings can appear in it, but they stay small next to the view, and the picture does not exist for their sake.
One of the earliest European examples is Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, painted around 1516 to 1517 by Joachim Patinir. He was Flemish, from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking south of present-day Belgium, and he worked in Antwerp, its great port city.
The panel tells a story from the Bible. To save the infant Jesus from King Herod, who wanted the child dead, Mary and Joseph flee with him to Egypt.
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Yet in Patinir's picture the family is easy to miss: three small figures on a road. The viewer looks down on the country as if from a hilltop. The near ground is brown, the fields beyond are green, and the far hills fade to blue at the horizon. The Bible story is still there, but the land has taken over.
His contemporaries saw that he was doing something new. The German artist Albrecht Dürer, who visited Antwerp in 1520 and 1521, called him der gut Landschaftsmaler, "the good landscape painter." That is among the earliest known uses of the term, and it named a new kind of specialist.
Dürer was writing in German. English took its own word from the Dutch landschap, which at first meant nothing more than a region, a stretch of country, and only around 1600 did that word come to mean a painting of natural scenery.
A background that took over the picture
Before Patinir, European painters had painted plenty of hills, rivers and trees, but only behind something else…
What You'll Discover
The painter who hid his signature in a tree.
Why Dutch buyers wanted views of their own land.
Why the French Academy ranked landscape near the bottom.
Why an English farm cart won a French medal.
The small invention that sent painters outdoors.