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山水画，艺术中自然风景的描绘。山水画可能捕捉山脉，山谷，水域，田野，森林和海岸，并且可能包含或可能不包含人造结构以及人。尽管最早的古代和古典时期的绘画都包含自然的风景元素，但直到16世纪的文艺复兴时期，景观才作为一种独立的风俗在西方传统中没有出现。在东方传统中，这种类型可以追溯到公元4世纪的中国。
以下文章仅讨论西方传统。有关其他山水画传统的更多信息，请按国家或地区进行搜索，例如中国画，日本艺术，南亚艺术：视觉艺术。
16、17和18世纪的山水画
尽管山水画本身并不是一种流派，并且在艺术学院严格的主题体系中被认为是低级的，但是在15世纪后期威尼斯出现的构图中，背景山水变得越来越细致。乔瓦尼·贝里尼（Giovanni Bellini）的作品中显着风景（花园中的痛苦，约1465年；圣杰罗姆·雷丁在风景中，约1480-85年），稍稍之后，乔尔乔涅（Giorgione）的作品（暴风雨，约1505年；崇拜） （牧羊人联盟，1505/10）。到16世纪中叶，北欧的艺术家，尤其是多瑙河派的艺术家，例如约阿希姆·帕蒂尼（Joachim Patinir）和阿尔布雷希特·阿尔特多夫（Albrecht Altdorfer），创作的画作虽然经常被圣经中的人物所占据，但却真正地以自然的方式颂扬了自然之美。在16世纪后期，佛兰德画家彼得·布鲁格（Pieter Bruegel the Elder）成为风景画家，擅长于色彩丰富，细节详尽的风景（伊卡洛斯陷落风景，1558年；雪中猎人，1565年；收割者，1565年）。
The 17th century ushered in the classical, or ideal, landscape, which set scenes in the mythic and idyllic Arcadia of ancient Greece. The leading practitioners of the classical landscape were the French-born Italy-based artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. With their idyllic scenes and classically ordered, harmonious compositions, Poussin and Claude attempted to elevate the reputation of the landscape genre in a variety of ways: by attaching metaphorical meaning to the natural elements of their paintings, by depicting mythological or biblical stories set in elaborate natural settings, and by emphasizing the heroic power of nature over humanity.
The other prominent landscape tradition of the 17th century emerged from the Netherlands in the work of Dutch artists Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and Meindert Hobbema. The sky, often ominously cloudy and filling half or more of the canvas, played a central role in setting the tone of a scene. The Dutch artists of that period infused the elements of their compositions with metaphorical meaning and made use of the visual impact of small figures in a vast landscape to express ideas on humanity and its relationship to almighty nature.
The centre of landscape painting during the 18th-century Rococo period shifted from Italy and the Netherlands to England and France. French painters Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher developed lyrical and romantic outdoor scenes that, with precise detail and delicate colouring, glorified nature. Their lighthearted landscapes—called fêtes galantes—were decorative vignettes filled with beautifully dressed men and women enjoying outdoor amusements and leisure time. The English Rococo landscape tradition was led by Richard Wilson, who painted in Italy as well as in his native England. His best-known painting, Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle (c. 1765), which shows a group of three people fishing at a lake framed by mountains, exemplifies his serene style. Other English landscape painters of note include Thomas Girtin, John Robert Cozens, and Thomas Gainsborough (who was also well known for his portraiture).
The Romantic landscape and the first half of the 19th century
Landscape artists of the 19th century embraced the wide-reaching Romantic movement and infused their compositions with passion and drama. It was in the 19th century that landscape painting finally emerged as a respectable genre within the art academies of Europe and gained a strong following in the United States as well. In England two of the foremost landscape painters were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Both artists worked on a grand scale to express the power of nature. They were both masters at capturing on canvas the atmospheric qualities of the weather. Constable, however, worked in a realist mode with a high level of precision in his landscapes of the English countryside, whereas Turner, particularly later in his career, produced wildly expressionistic and atmospheric seascapes that verged on abstraction.
In Germany the Romantic landscape was epitomized in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings were charged with emotional and religious symbolism and could be interpreted allegorically. Friedrich’s The Cross in the Mountains (c. 1808)—a painting of a crucifix illuminated by the sun’s rays at the summit of mountain—expresses a spiritual sentiment by way of the natural elements. French artists Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau, and others were part of the Barbizon school (1830s–70s), a group that painted in and around the Fontainebleau forest. The artists, though only loosely tied to one another, were united in their interest in capturing carefully observed nature. They eschewed the formal balanced compositions of their predecessors in preference for a truer, if less harmonious, depiction of their surroundings.
In the United States the Hudson River school (1825–70) painters were centred in the Hudson River valley in New York. In paintings of the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River, and the wilderness of New England and beyond, the artists captured dramatic effects of light and shade, the finest details of their subject matter, and celebrated the unique beauty of still-untouched areas of the American landscape. The group’s first members—Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Doughty—inspired numerous younger painters including Frederic Edwin Church, Fitz Henry Lane, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade. The invention of the tin tube for paint (1841) and the invention of the portable collapsible easel (also in the mid-19th century) revolutionized the landscape genre by allowing artists to venture out of the studio and study and paint their subjects firsthand. Outdoor painting became the dominant practice of the Impressionist painters of the late 19th century.
