Landscape painting has long been considered a secondary genre that essentially provided the background of the painting. With landscapers, it now acquires its autonomy and becomes the central theme of pictorial works. These painters let themselves be seduced by landscapes and their ability to trigger emotional impulses. Two English painters exert a great influence: their landscapes cease to be a setting for emotion, as if art ceased to imitate nature to reveal the spirit which contains. John Constable (1776-1837) painted nature for himself, with no staging effect. First artist to paint in the open air in order to be able to reproduce the mobility and vibration of light on things, Constable allows the entry of fine light and wet atmosphere into the painting. He executes landscapes in conformity with the truth, from which emerges a great serenity: "I have never seen in my life an ugly thing, for whatever the form of an object, the light, the shadow and the perspective always make it a beautiful thing. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1773-1851), much less faithful to reality than Constable, tended to make the motive of his landscapes unreal.
The canvas, invaded by vapours or devoured by fire, becomes a dream setting: the drawing is only allusive, the contrasts of shadow and light no longer exist, the color, often spread with a knife, becomes radiant By this lyricism and this moving imprecision, which characterize as well Snowstorm at sea (1842) that Rain, Vapour and Velocity (1844), Turner, who favours the atmosphere over matter and who transcends the world of solids to translate that of fluids, passes the painting from the reproduction of the visible to the integration of the sensible and, in so doing, opens a way that will lead to abstraction.
The landscapes of the German Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), which are of the transcendent order, are very different. Nature, charged here with a religious atmosphere, evokes the deep aspirations of the romantic soul. With strong symbolism, nature reveals the presence of the afterlife in our world. Constable and Turner already announce impressionism: the first by painting in the middle of nature and the second, by the vapors of colors and light that it represents and by its dizzying clouds, which melts losing their contour to the subjects. As for Friedrich, his spirituality opens the way to symbolism.
Thus, in Voyageur over (1818), the central character, confronted with an unfathomable solitude, rises above materiality to allow his soul to take the measure of the mystery of infinity. In his twilight-coloured painting, where great attention is paid to the effect of contrasts, Friedrich puts into practice the advice he once gave to a young painter: "Bring up to day what you have seen in your night."
The importance of landscape painting thus grew considerably in the 19th century. In France, under the influence of realism, landscape artists wanted to evoke states of mind less than to produce an objective painting, a painting that is as faithful as possible to reality. This is the case of the so-called Barbizon school painters, including Théodore Rousseau, Charles François Daubigny and Jean-François Millet, for whom the surrounding nature becomes the subject of their paintings. This is also, and above all, the case of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), whose paintings are distinguished by a clear palette that tries to capture the elusive light of the morning, this first impression of the day.
In front of the great compositions of a serene nature of this painter, Delacroix will say: "He is a rare genius and the father of the modern landscape." The new importance attached to nature and the updating of the cult of the landscape lead the artists insensibly to paint interior landscapes, that is to say those which are carried by the bursts of the unconscious.
