Design Inspiration: 15 Breathtaking Landscape Photographs
“I think that the landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don’t think it’s true of people who grew up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don’t think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the color of the earth; it’s a different kind of love.”
-Arundhati Roy
Ah, the landscape! For many of us, it’s the first thing we draw as children and it still holds its grip upon us when we grow up. Is it any surprise that many of the worlds’ greatest works of visual art are landscapes? Be they painted, drawn or photographed, landscapes hold a huge place in our cultural tableau.
The landscape holds a certain mystique that is impossible to ignore. It’s like a calling. The same calling that once used to excite cartographers and explorers.
There’s just something about the sky to earth ratio, about the horizon and the shape the horizon line takes in various places that just stimulates the imagination, that gives us a feeling akin to what graphic designer John Koening, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, has dubbed “la cuna” and defines as “a twinge of sadness that there’s no frontier left, that as the last explorer trudged with his armies toward a blank spot on the map, he didn’t suddenly remember his daughter’s upcoming piano recital and turn for home, leaving a new continent unexplored so we could set its mists and mountains aside as a strategic reserve of mystery, if only to answer more of our children’s questions with “Nobody knows! Out there, anything is possible.”
A Brief History of the Landscape in Art
Myriads of artists have celebrated the landscape in the past. The earliest artistic depictions of landscapes known today date from ancient Greece and Rome, respectively. Despite these early origins, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that landscape painting truly came to be one of the trademarks of Western art.
Of course, in the early Renaissance, landscapes had yet to become an individual genre. Instead, they served as backdrops for religious & mythological paintings, that typically contained three elements: the portrait of the figure depicted, a still nature and a landscape backdrop.
These three became individualized in the 17th century, when there were already two centres of landscape painting: Italy and the Netherlands. This, of course, ties in to the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance artistic period, but that’s not really what we’re pursuing right now, so we’ll just leave it at that and recommend you check out H.W. Jansons’ History of Art if you want to know more about this and many other art history-related topics.
Nevertheless, painting landscapes was a lot more important in the Netherlands due to the fact that this is when they had obtained their independence from Spain and decided to take a step back from the Spanish artistic direction (Roman Catholic depictions of saints and biblical episodes) and chose to paint the distinctive landscapes of the new Dutch Republic.
During the 1700s, there were two new centres of landscape-oriented art: France and Britain. During this period, alongside exotic landscapes that first appeared due to people in these areas beginning to travel more both in Europe and abroad, pastoral scenes abounded.
Once photography became a mainstream artform, the landscape of landscape art changed. For one thing, landscapes were soon depicted in in photographs and, for another, with the appearance of Impressionism in the late 19th century, more and more painters started to paint outside and painted deeply personal landscapes.
Of course, in the following century and up to present day, the landscape has become one of the most frequent artistic subjects and has generated thousands upon thousands of artworks.
15 Breathtaking Landscape Photographs
Seeing as we’ve covered the history of the landscape as a subject in the visual media, we’re going to go ahead and show you some of our favorite landscape photos. Each of these is absolutely stunning and can serve as design inspiration for your future project.
Well, that pretty much wraps up our look into landscape photography, how awesome it can be and our list of stunning landscape photographs. What are your favorites? Please don’t hesitate to tell us in a comment by using the form below this article!
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