page_title: Winter landscapes in Western art
section_title: Romantic landscape painting
hierarchical_section_title: Winter landscapes in Western art / History / Romantic landscape painting
context_page_description: The depiction of winter landscapes in Western art begins in the 15th century. Wintry and snowy landscapes are not seen in early European painting since most of the subjects were religious. Painters avoided landscapes in general for the same reason. The first depictions of snow began to occur in the 15th and 16th centuries. Paintings that feature snow as a theme are mostly landscapes, even if some of these works involve religious or even fantasy landscapes. Most of these winter landscapes in art history are plein-air depictions of winter scenes, using the quality of gray winter light to create the special winter atmosphere.
  Depiction of snow in Europe is essentially a northern European theme.
context_section_description: Later, after a relatively warm period that coincided with the end of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age, the European climate turned cool again, heading for a trough whose lowest point was in the second decade of the 19th century. In 1809, a series of major volcanic eruptions heralded the arrival of a particularly cold period as the clouds of ash partially blocked out the sun. The decade from 1810 to 1819 was the coldest in England since the 17th century. In 1812, the French Grande Armée was forced to retreat from Moscow by the advancing winter – known to the Russians as General Snow. These climactic events played a great part in the development of a new art genre, the winter landscape.
  In the late 18th century, the growing Romantic movement intensified interest in landscape painting, including winter landscapes. Practitioners included the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, who depicted remote and wild landscapes. Caspar David Friedrich was a romantic landscape painter, and was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes as austere, forbidding and desolate. His winter scenes are solemn and still. They are often painted plein-air, with the artist using the thin, gray light of winter to create an appropriate atmosphere and illustrate the effect of light reflected off snow. According to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which "no man has yet set his foot". Although based on direct observation, his landscapes did not reproduce nature but were painted to create a dramatic effect, using nature as a mirror of human emotions. His aim was a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature, paralleling Romanticism's validation of intense emotions such as apprehension, fear, horror, terror and awe. Awe in particular – experienced when confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities – drew Friedrich's interest, as seen in his idealized portrayals of coasts, forests and craggy mountains. Friedrich created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling – die romantische Stimmungslandschaft. His works detail a wide range of geographical features, and he used the landscape as an expression of religious mysticism.
  Along with other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. His style influenced his contemporary, the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857), and, later, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) and many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–98).
  
  The work of the 18th-century Düsseldorf School is characterized by finely detailed but still fanciful landscapes, often portraying religious or allegorical stories. Leading members of the Düsseldorf School advocated plein-air painting and tended to use a palette of relatively subdued and muted colors. The Düsseldorf School grew out of, and was a part of, the German Romantic movement. Prominent members of the Düsselorf School included Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, Rudolf Koller, Karl Friedrich Lessing, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Andreas Achenbach, Hans Fredrik Gude, Oswald Achenbach and Adolf Schrödter.
  French painters were slower to develop landscape painting, but from about the 1830s Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other artists of the Barbizon School established a French landscape tradition that in the 19th century would become the most influential in Europe.
  It is often assumed that plein-air painting started with the 19th-century Impressionists, but in fact it was already common in the late 18th century when the members of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters were already painting in plein-air.Frederic Edwin Church, a central figure in the Hudson River School, was known for painting large landscapes that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America.
  Plein-air painting, in its strictest sense, is the practice of painting landscape pictures out-of-doors; more loosely, the achievement of an intense impression of the open air (French: plein air) in a lands
caption: Caspar David Friedrich: Winter Landscape (c. 1811)
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