Accordingly, artists’ renderings of landscape highlight recognizable sites, distinctive topography, or natural beauty. However, landscape styles have never stayed within geographic boundaries. For example, Rome, as the unrivaled center for artistic training over several centuries, exerted enormous influence, and even artists from northern Europe learned to bathe their landscapes in the light of Italy’s classical tradition. Seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, with their low horizons and expansive skies, came into vogue a century later in France and England, and artists there did not hesitate to fill the demand with landscapes in the desired style.
Featuring European and American masters from the Smart’s collection, this exhibition focused on exchange among landscape traditions, while questioning the usefulness and limitations of conventional geographic classifications.