The Artist Out of Doors

Excellent online three week course from the National Gallery on landscape painting and how artists worked out of doors and represent themselves in the work.

Aliki Braine, artist an art historian, guided us chronologically through the topic starting with how landscape painting grew out of map making and then often forms a stage set for a biblical or mythical scene, moving on to how it represented leisure and wealth in the 17th century and onto the from accuracy to atmosphere in the 19th century.

In taking this approach she also laid out clearly the various theories of landscape painting over the centuries with good quotes which she then used to discuss a series of images. She also looked at how artists represented themselves in the work from including draftsmen in the image to emphasis that they had been to the place and recorded it to later artists whose hand we see in their brushwork.

I was impressed at the array of artists that we covered and I discovered a number of names who were new to me.

 

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