A landscape painting is a picture whose main subject is the natural world itself: land, sky, water, mountains and trees. People can appear in it, but they are small, and they are not the reason the picture exists. Joachim Patinir's Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, painted around 1516 to 1517 and now in Antwerp, is one of the earliest European examples.
The word comes from the Dutch landschap, which at first meant nothing more than a region, a stretch of country. Only around 1600 did it come to mean a painting of natural scenery.
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The Holy Family is in Patinir's picture, but it is easy to miss. Mary, Joseph and the Child are small figures on a road. Around them, the country opens out as if seen from a hilltop, in bands of brown, green and blue that run back to the horizon. The Bible story is still there, but the land has taken over the panel.
Patinir's contemporaries saw that he was doing something new. The German artist Albrecht Dürer, who spent a year in Antwerp in 1520 and 1521 and met him there, called him der gut Landschaftsmaler, the good landscape painter. It is the earliest known use of the term, and it names a new kind of specialist.
Europe was just inventing that specialist. The kind of picture he made, a picture given over to mountains and rivers, was much older, and it had been painted on the other side of the world.
What You'll Discover
Where a Chinese painter hid his name.
Why Dutch buyers wanted views of their own land.
What the French Academy thought landscape was worth.
Why an English farm cart won a French medal.
The small invention that sent painters outdoors.