Landscape as a stand-alone genre in art only properly took root in the early 17th century. In 1627-28 Edward Norgate, a gentleman musician and connoisseur who served both James I and Charles I, wrote a treatise called Miniatura or the Art of Limning in which he described landscape painting as “An Art soe new in England, and soe Lately come a shore, as all the language in our fower Seas cannot find it a Name, but a borrowed one”. That name – landscape – came from the old Dutch landtschap and, said Norgate, meant a “beautifull prospect of Fields, Cities, Rivers, Castles, Mountaines, Trees or what soever delightfull view the Eye takes pleasure in”. What he had also identified was that the difference between land and landscape is human perception. The first exists regardless of our presence, the second only in our experience of it.
Landscape paintings quickly took on numerous forms – topographical, emotional, ideal, imaginative, documentary – and as colonialism spread ever wider it started to record new realms. Frans Post, for example, sent back images of Dutch holdings in Brazil, and William Hodges, an artist attached to Captain Cook’s second voyage, painted Polynesia. Such unfamiliar and evocative lands would inspire painters as diverse as Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Paul Klee and John Minton.
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