Landscape

For a long time landscape was merely a backdrop to people and gods before it became a subject in its own right. We follow nature in art from Roman wall paintings and Chinese mountain scrolls, through Dutch skies and Romantic mists, to the Impressionists' open-air painting, Swedish summer nights and art made directly in the landscape.

• Backdrops – antiquity and the Middle Ages
• World landscapes – Leonardo, Giorgione and Patinir
• Dutch skies – 17th-century realism
• The ideal landscape – Claude and Poussin
• The sublime nature of Romanticism
• Into the open air – Barbizon, Impressionism and Cézanne
• Mountains and water – Chinese shanshui
• Japanese landscapes – from Sesshū to Hiroshige
• Nordic light and new landscapes