About

Landscapes have always played a major part in Western art, either as an end in themselves or as background to a painting’s human or animal subjects. When western artists travelled to foreign lands in the vanguard of colonial conquest, they frequently painted landscapes – because the scenery was compelling, because they wanted to document what they saw, or perhaps even motivated by an impulse to contain the unfamiliar within a familiar format and take it home, where it could be safely enjoyed and act as an invitation to other European adventurers.

This act of summarising the landscape, …