For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art.

Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg is one of Albrecht Altdorfer’s five known pure landscape paintings, and was made between about 1528-30. This develops repoussoir, following the foreground – middle distance – far distance convention, with a low horizon to accommodate the framing trees and allow a dramatic cloudscape, laying the foundation for so many landscapes of the future.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of Nicolas Poussin’s late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably all part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats, which are grazing erratically at the borders of a track meandering down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There is nothing which appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

All the clues given by the artist point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c 1636) is one of Peter Paul Rubens larger landscapes from the end of his career. As the sun is rising off to the right, a man drives a cart, on top of which a woman is perched precariously, away from Ruben’s castellated mansion. Beside that stream, a hunter is stalking game with his gun and dog.

A small group of people are on the grass in front of the house: a woman is seated, perhaps nursing an infant; next to her is another woman, and a man. Another man is fishing in the moat, from the bridge which connects its main entrance with the outside world. At the far right, a milkmaid walks out to a small herd of cows. There are birds in the sky, and some small tits and others on the scrub in the foreground. Beyond, a great plain of meadows and woods sweeps far to the horizon. The day has begun.

The similarities in his composition with those of nearly twenty years earlier are remarkable. However, there’s one big difference: while undoubtedly idealised, this painting is based on a real and known geographical location just outside the city of Antwerp.

Some landscape painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Before Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes sketched in oils in front of his motifs in the Roman Campagna, in around 1782, very few landscape paintings were made in front of the motif. Valenciennes not only assembled himself a library of sketches such as this magnificent View of Rome, but wrote an influential treatise advocating this as a technique. This paved the way for greater fidelity in views and ultimately Impressionism.

JMW Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from 1839 anticipates Impressionist style. It retains several conventional features, though, using repoussoir at the right, and a parade of buildings to lead the eye past the mass of the Colosseum into the distant mist. He uses staffage extensively in the foreground, with a group of three goats at the right and sundry figures at the left. As this is a view from elevation looking down, the horizon is for once well above its midline.

Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Wave, painted on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882, is inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and takes Impressionism to its limits in the dissolution of form.

In the late nineteenth century, landscape painters including Camille Pissarro transferred their attention to cities like Paris, in his case primarily because of eye problems. In January 1897, Pissarro painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes. His Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

Ferdinand Hodler’s view of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light, painted a few months before he died in 1918, completed his reduction of this view into bands consisting of water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Paul Nash’s Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion in 1942. Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

I hope you have enjoyed this series celebrating different aspects of landscape painting.