Landscapes

The Landscapes collection at The Metropolitan Museum contains a wide variety of artworks depicting different types of landscapes. Some of these landscapes are natural and unaltered by human activity, while others are cultural landscapes that have been significantly modified by humans. These artworks provide a glimpse into the different ways that humans have interacted with and viewed the landscape over time.

Vase

    This vase is among the most ambitious ceramics made in this nation's early republic era.
    Referencing sumptuous metal-mounted French porcelains of the period, it features elaborate gilded and polychrome enamel decoration.
    Each side is embellished with a different view of Philadelphia, taken from print sources.

Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan

    Paul Cezanne is rightly remembered for his important contribution to the rise of Modernism in the twentieth century.
    His paintings introduced a novel visual language of form, perspective, and structure, challenging age-old conventions in the formal arrangement of a picture.
    "Trees and Houses near the Jas de Bouffan" was painted "sur le motif," directly from nature, its view taken south of the Jas de Bouffan, the Cezanne family residence near Aix-en-Provence.
    Cezanne treats his subject with great economy:his brush marks are lean and articulated, his palette of yellows and greens is relatively simple, and areas of the canvas are unbrushed, exposing ground in patches that read as color.
    All his life, Cezanne played with spatial relationships in nature, whether working from life or from memory.
    Here the bare, attenuated trees appear as a frieze against the zones of recessive color, applied as though watercolor, not oil, were the medium.

Jalais Hill, Pontoise

    This view of Pontoise, just northwest of Paris, helped establish Pissarro's reputation as an innovative painter of the rural French landscape.

Wheat Fields

    Twenty-seven views of fields by Ruisdael survive today.
    In this celebrated example, the artist used the building blocks of land, sky, and sea to create an imposing vision of cultivated nature.
    On the road before us, a man with a traveler's pack approaches a woman and child, while the cumulus clouds dominating the sky add their own element of drama.
    A glimpse of boats at sea on the far left knits this quintessentially Dutch landscape into the wider world.

The Penitence of Saint Jerome

    Albrecht Durer referred to the artist in 1521 as the "good landscape painter."

The Funeral

    Manet's unfinished painting is thought to depict the funeral of the writer Charles Baudelaire, which took place on September 2, 1867.
    The artist, unlike other friends who had yet to return from vacation or stayed away owing to the threatening summer storm, was among the few mourners present.
    This view of the meager funeral cortège at the foot of the Butte Mouffetard, a hill in southwest Paris, is framed by the silhouettes of the towers and cupolas of the Val de Grâce, the Panthéon, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and the Tour de Clovis in the background.

The Brook in the Woods

    Whittredge, as a colleague of the second-generation Hudson River School artists John Frederick Kensett and Sanford R. Gifford, specialized in views of the Catskill Mountains, New England, and the American West.
    His later works, however, demonstrate his growing interest in the poetic landscapes of the French Barbizon painters as well as the evocative canvases of George Inness, who worked in Montclair, New Jersey, not far from the home Whittredge occupied in Summit from 1880 until his death in 1910.
    "The Brook in the Woods" is a fine example of his Barbizon-inspired mode.

A Roman Landscape with Figures