Since the early cave paintings, humans have found inspiration in nature and tried to reproduce this on walls, canvas, and other surfaces or materials. This list covers a small selection of old and new masters (in order of birth) whose artworks are inspired by nature and the natural world.
1. Hokusai (1760-1849)
Japanese artist Hokusai, went by many pseudonyms in his lifetime, is famously known outside of Japan for his woodblock print "Under the Wave off Kanagawa" (1830–32; popularly called The Great Wave; shown above). But he was prolific and produced thousands of paintings and prints, as well as illustrations for nearly 270 books.
He began drawing aged 6 and continued making art for the next 80-plus years. In his teens he apprenticed as a wood-block engraver, which contributed to his artistic development as a printmaker. He went on to become a master artist and printmaker of the Japanese ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) school.
His work ranged widely, with particular emphasis on landscape views and historical scenes. He also experimented with Western-style perspective and colouring for a while. He would rise early and continue painting until well after dark. His famous print series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” published between 1826 and 1833, marked the summit in the history of the Japanese landscape print.
2. Constable (1776-1837)
John Constable was a major figure in English landscape painting in the early 19th century. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, mostly in Suffolk, where he was born and lived. His native valley of the River Stour, came to be known as "Constable country", after his landscape paintings. He was largely self-taught, and developed slowly.
He would start by making open-air sketches, using these to produce large exhibition paintings which he created in the studio. Unlike others at the time, he liked to paint places connected with his family or where he happened to be instead of places popular with the touring public. While he was not well received in England during his lifetime, he did have success in Paris and is very popular today. He is known for the realism and vitality of his works. For example, "The Haywain" (above), which he painted in oils in 1821, is one of his best known works.
3. Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
Thomas Cole is seen as the artist that inspired the generation of American landscape painters who came to be known as the Hudson River School. This art movement focussed attention on the Hudson River Valley area. Cole was born in Lancashire in the UK, but emigrated to the US with his family as a teenager.
Un-enchanted by the family business of wallpaper manufacturing, he turned to art, learning the basics from another artist and going on to paint large landscape paintings, sometimes removing urban elements or developments from them, such as with his oil on canvas “Distant View of Niagara Falls".
4. Marianne North (1830-1890)
Victorian biologist and prolific botanical painter Marianne North defied convention by travelling the world, first with her father, and then solo after his death. Born in Hastings, England, she began painting flowers after the death of her mother. Her father knew the Director the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and this may have started her interest in botany.
Over the years, she challenged the tradition of Victorian flower painting by choosing to paint flowers in their natural settings instead. She travelled all over the world visiting 17 countries on 6 continents, from the Americas to Africa, Asia and Australasia, over 14 years. During this time she painted over 800 paintings. As a result, her work became a powerful record of the plants and dramatic landscapes that she saw on her travels, many years ahead of the invention of colour photographs. For example, her oil painting "View of the Salak Volcano, Java, from Buitenzorg" (1876; shown above) created during her travels in Asia.
Instead of water based paints, she worked in oil paints, which was unusual for a botanical painter, particularly one travelling. She presented her life's work of 832 paintings to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where you can still view them in the gallery she funded to house them.
5. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
Another German-American painter associated with the Hudson River School movement was Albert Bierstadt. He was inspired to paint the rugged beauty of the great outdoors by many journeys to the American West. As such, he is also considered a member of the Rocky Mountain School art movement.
His detailed paintings often portrayed romantic, almost glowing light, sometimes called luminism. Some of his most famous works include "Valley of the Yosemite" (1864; oil on paperboard, shown above) and "Storm in the Mountains".
6. Ernst Haeckel (born 1834)
A German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and physician, Ernst Haeckel studied medicine at the University of Berlin and graduated in 1857. While he was studying, his professor took him on a summer field trip to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea. This sparked his life-long fascination for natural forms and biology.
At 25, he travelled to Italy where he discovered his artistic talent. He studied structures of radiolarians (microscopic protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons) in Messina. Between 1860 and 1862 he published 59 scientific illustrations of these, along with the microscope slides.
One of his most famous publications is his series: Kunstformen Der Natur (Artforms in Nature) from 1904, which includes hundreds of highly detailed drawings that became known as a “visual encyclopedia” of living things. These multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement.
7. Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
The American artist Winslow Homer is particularly well known for his landscape and marine or seascape paintings. He was born in Boston and self-taught, initially working as a commerical illustrator and designing magazines. He often created paintings during his vacations.
He became proficient with oil paints and later mastered watercolours, enabling him to focus solely on painting. Some of his most famous nature inspired paintings, include, “Sunlight on the Coast" (oil on canvas, shown above) and “Gloucester Harbor”.
8. Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
A French artist, Cézanne was a prominent figure in the Post-Impressionist movement. His paintings are characterised with bold and gorgeous colours. Among his most notable paintings are "Mont Sainte-Victoire" (oil on canvas, shown above) and a study of trees entitled "Jas de Bouffan", completed in 1887.
He changed conventional approaches to perspective and refused to be bound by the prevailing rules of academic art by emphasizing the underlying structure of objects in composition. While is paintings were initially ridiculed by art critics, his fellow artists (such as Camille Pissarro) and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard discovered his work and bought his paintings, leading to wider acclaim.
9. Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. He depicted subjects of his immediate surroundings.
While he had limited success in his early years, only exhibiting a handful of landscapes, seascapes and portraits in the salons of the 1860s, his "Impression, Sunrise" (oil on canvas, shown above), independently exhibited with his peers' work, is known for titling the Impressionist movement. This now world-famous painting drew scorn at the time for its loose painting and indistinct forms. Monet took his close observation and naturalistic representation to great scale, often painting directly on large-scale canvases outdoors.
His work was also influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, resulting in asymmetrical arrangements that reflected two dimensional forms. His lively, bright paintings were prepared with light coloured primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings at the time. For example, "The Seine at Giverny".
10. Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
Henri Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter and is celebrated as being one of the best naive and 'primitive' artists. He was self-taught and liked to create meticulously detailed fantasy pictures of lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic figures.
He is known for saying he had "no teacher other than nature". In fact he never left France - most of his work was not based on first hand experiences, but on stories of tropical places that he heard from others or print ads which he had seen. Some of his notable paintings include "Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)” (oil on canvas, shown above) and “The Flamingos”.
11. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
Unappreciated in his lifetime, the Dutch-born painter Van Goh is now revered for his expressive Post-Impressionist paintings. He travelled extensively through Europe and worked in several fields before deciding to turn seriously to art. He studied drawing and taught himself by studiously copying or 'interpreting' others' prints and artworks, sometimes drawing multiple copies.
One of his most famous paintings, "The Starry Night", was created in the last year of his life. And did you know that he actually created multiple versions of his famous "Sunflower" paintings?. Many of his works reimagined gardens and rural landscapes in his beautiful sweeping style and colours. For example, "Wheat Field with Cypresses" (1889; oil on canvas, shown above).
12. Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947)
Edgar Payne was an American plein air painter known for his vibrant paintings and loose gestural brushwork. His paintings feature scenes in America and Europe, from the Sierra Nevada to Alpine mountains. He was born in Missouri and briefly studied art in Chicago, before travelling to California where he met his wife. His first trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains inspired a lifelong obsession with this area, to which he returned again and again to paint the rugged landscapes, including "High Sierra" (1921; oil on canvas, shown above).
His reverence for nature and rugged landscapes was a hallmark of his work. He also painted murals to supplement his income. In 1941 he wrote "Composition of Outdoor Painting", a comprehensive book on composition and composition forms. The book also explains landscape painting techniques, color, repetition, rhythm, and value. The seventh edition printing of the work was completed in 2005.
13. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)
American artist Georgia O’Keeffe grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. After high school, she set her heart on being an artist and studied art and painting techniques in Chicago and New York. She went on to study the revolutionary ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, which prompted her to explore abstraction and the essential abstract forms in nature.
Her primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, explored in series over several years and even decades. She specialised in producing large-format paintings that displayed huge enlarged flower blossoms. She drew inspiration from her life experience and her images often related generally or specifically to places where she lived. You can view her collected works online here at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
14. David Hockney (born 1937)
British artist David Hockney is an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s and considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. He studied at Bradford School of Art in the 1950s and the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. He was awarded the Royal College of Art gold medal in 1962 in recognition of his mastery as a draughtsman and his innovative paintings.
He then moved to Los Angeles, where he produced iconic images of urban life. He made records and headlines with his 1972 work "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)", which sold at Christie's in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction at the time.
Later he evolved to focus on more naturalistic subjects, from huge, brightly coloured landscape paintings in oils to digital drawings using an ipad. He returned to Yorkshire to create a beautiful series of large format works depicting the Yorkshire countryside and Woldgate Woods throughout the seasons.
15. Wyland (born 1956)
American artist and conservationist Wyland is best known for his more than 100 Whaling Walls. These large outdoor murals feature images of life-size whales and other sea life to call attention marine conservation throughout the world. Born in Michigan, he began painting as a child. He was first inspired by marine life, when he visited Laguna Beach, California, with his family at 14 years old, where he saw the ocean for the first time and witnessed gray whales migrating down the California coast.
Since then he has travelled the globe for more than twenty-five years, capturing the raw power and beauty of the undersea universe. He is known for his many expressive paintings in oils, acrylics and watercolours, of whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles and other marine life. He also established the Wyland Foundation, in partnership with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to teach millions of students around the world about our oceans, rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands.
16. Libby Edmondson (born 20th Century)
British artist Libby Edmondson settled near Kendal in the Lake District in 2000. There she painted over 270 beautiful artworks in stunning colour palettes, all inspired by stunning topography of the surrounding landscape. Many of these paintings were created with acrylics and one of the distinguishing features of all Libby’s artwork work was a vibrant use of colour. Over the course of her whole career, she painted a mix of landscapes, still lifes and nature studies. She interpreted the landscape in her own unique style and with a distinctive use of bold and vibrant colour.
17. Danielle Akiyama O'Connor (born 1957)
Canadian artist Danielle O'Connor Akiyama is known for her loose and impressionistic art style, and her distinctive fusion of eastern and western artistry. She has lived in Canada and Ireland and travelled widely, at one point immersing herslef in the study of Japanese brush painting (Sumi-e) and received the esteemed Master's Seal in recognition of her exceptional talent. The red Japanese chop mark which appears in all her work signifies her honorary Sumi-E title, ‘Source of Joy’.
Her work often depicts vibrant and abstracted flowers and landscapes. Her vibrant palette, loose formal structure and unique vocabulary of signs and symbols make her work both instantly recognisable. She also "connects her paintings to the earth" by incorporating pounded minerals into her work to create texture in the paints. View her paintings at Clarendon Fine Art.
18. Erin Hanson (born 1981)
Erin Hanson began painting with oils at eight years old, and apprenticed at a mural studio as a teenager. After studying bioengineering at UC Berkeley, she began rock climbing at Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. There she was inspired by the colourful scenery she was climbing and returned to her love of painting. She decided to create one painting every week for the rest of her life, and that is what she has done. The result is a prolific series of stunning, increasingly multi-coloured landscapes in gorgueous hues - from the deserts of Arizona, to California's coasts and wine country and many more American landscapes.
Through the years, Hanson has continued to use the outdoors to inspire a vast collection of over 3,000 works. She drew inspiration from the paintings and teachings of the American plein air painter Edgar Payne to develop her work.
She has developed her own style of painting, which she calls 'Open Impressionism'. Open Impressionism uses color to create emotion, thick oil paint strokes to create movement, and separated brushwork to create a stained glass effect. Open Impressionism is a blend of classical impressionism and modern expressionism, with a dash of plein air style. View her full works on her website.
Instead of building up the painting layer by layer, Hanson lays paint strokes side by side without overlapping, giving a mosaic effect to her artwork. This means getting strokes right the first time. She uses a limited palette of only five pigments to create a vivid dance of un-muddied color upon the canvas, choosing colors that ignite the imagination and capture the emotional feeling of being out of doors.
She says: "My goal is to capture the beauty of light during the golden hour and transform ordinary landscapes into extraordinary mosaics of color and texture."
