Landscape painter Marvin Jemal shares that in the history of art, landscape painting, or nature in general, occupies a very particular place that must be distinguished from other established genres, such as history painting, genre painting and portraiture. The desire to place natural elements in the center of the work is found in all parts of the world. Widely practiced in the West, it is also a Japanese and Chinese specialty.

According to Marvin Jemal, in Europe, despite an undeniable persistence of the genre from antiquity to modernity, landscape painting only asserted itself in the course of the 15th-16th century, in particular thanks to the works of the Amberino painter Joachim Patinier. For one of the first times in Western pictorial art, the landscape is truly the figurative subject of the canvas. Another important element is involved in the emergence of landscape painting as a genre in its own right: the impact of the Protestant influence in the Netherlands. Protestantism is a deeply iconophobic doctrine, it prohibits the biblical image, always suspected of provoking idolatrous worship.

Marvin Jemal indicates that between the 16th and 17th centuries a whole band of Flemish and Dutch creators was developed, specialized in the representation of pastoral scenes, still lifes and landscapes of all kinds: autumn landscapes, snowy landscapes, Provençal landscapes, landscaped landscapes, rural landscapes, etc. The French painter Claude Gellée, known as Claudio de Lorraine, has been chosen among many others by art historians as the landscaper who gave the art of landscape painting recognition for him. But artists such as Watteau, Vermeer or El Greco can also be cited, each with their own style of painting. Starting in the 19th century, landscape painting is no longer just decorative and no longer has anything to prove.

Marvin Jemal claims that most painters are inspired by techniques specific to this genre and, in terms of quantity, their production is equivalent to painting portraits. The arrival of photography in the 1850s and the development of Romanticism also contributed greatly to the democratization of the landscape as the main motif of the work. On the other hand, massive industrialization leads many artists to elevate nature to the rank of sublime expression of a "truth" that is lost and corrupted in the cities. Then, William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich make the figuration of nature a means of communicating melancholic and tortured states of mind, of representing emotions in their purest state.

Finally, Marvin Jemal specifies that the journey is widely glorified and the search for exoticism motivates the orientalist movement, which illustrates a certain imagination of foreign lands. Claude Monet's impressionism at the end of the 19th century marks a veritable revolution in the practice of landscape painting, and marks a decisive turning point in the history of painting by emphasizing not on the naturalistic accuracy of the line and the fidelity to the model, but on the effects of light. The landscape painting should no longer be similar to what is represented, but rather express a subjective impression, a singular perception. During the 20th century, a multiplicity of artistic movements reinterpreted, in turn, the art of landscape painting.

Marvin Jemal will share more about landscape painting in this podcast.