W T Carlsen

Mary DeNeale Morgan was born in San Francisco, 1868. She was taken to Oakland in 1872, where the painter William Keith was her first teacher. She was precocious. In 1886, she enrolled in the California School of Design in San Francisco and studied with Emil Carlsen and Amédée Joullin until 1890. Morgan paid her first visit to Carmel in 1903. In 1910, she returned to buy the studio and home of the late Sydney Yard, located next to what is now the Cypress Inn on Lincoln. From then on through the 1940s, her studio was filled with tourists, buyers, other artists and friends. The building — ever-expanding with new rooms and more paintings — became a meeting place for civic activists. Morgan’s style was her own, containing elements of the Barbizon School, sometimes tonalist or California Impressionist, but always distinctly her own, usually in vivid color with broad, bold strokes, sometimes laid on with a palette knife.

When pressed to say what school of painting she belonged to, she replied that she was a "horse and buggy artist." She refused to be typed. Morgan’s favorite subject was the Monterey cypresses. When asked if she didn't tire of that subject, she replied that she "would stick by her cypress trees till they sink into the sea, or — what is just as tragic and final — be hopelessly built-around." In 1915, she won a Silver Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In 1928, she was selected by Scribner's Magazine as one of the nation's foremost women artists. Morgan rarely traveled outside Carmel, never outside the U.S., but had one-woman shows in San Francisco; New York; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago.

(Biography provided by Robert Azensky Fine Art)

It could be argued that cave walls were the canvases for the world’s first landscape paintings, which depict and elevate natural scenery through art, but there is a richer history to consider.

The Netherlands was home to landscapes as a major theme in painting as early as the 1500s, and ink-on-silk paintings in China featured mountains and large bodies of water as far back as the third century. Greeks created vast wall paintings that depicted landscapes and grandiose garden scenes, while in the late 15th century and early 16th century, landscapes were increasingly the subject of watercolor works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolomeo.

The popularity of religious paintings eventually declined altogether, and by the early 19th century, painters of classical landscapes took to painting out-of-doors (plein-air painting). Paintings of natural scenery were increasingly realistic but romanticized too. Into the 20th century, landscapes remained a major theme for many artists, and while the term “landscape painting” may call to mind images of lush, grassy fields and open seascapes, the genre is characterized by more variety, colors and diverse styles than you may think. Painters working in the photorealist style of landscape painting, for example, seek to create works so lifelike that you may confuse their paint for camera pixels. But if you’re shopping for art to outfit an important room, the work needs to be something with a bit of gravitas (and the right frame is important, too).

Adding a landscape painting to your home can introduce peace and serenity within the confines of your own space. (Some may think of it as an aspirational window of sorts rather than a canvas.) Abstract landscape paintings by the likes of Korean painter Seungyoon Choi or Georgia-based artist Katherine Sandoz, on the other hand, bring pops of color and movement into a room. These landscapes refuse to serve as a background. Elsewhere, Adam Straus’s technology-inspired paintings highlight how our extreme involvement with our devices has removed us from the glory of the world around us. Influenced by modern life and steeped in social commentary, Straus’s landscape paintings make us see our surroundings anew.

Whether you’re seeking works by the world’s most notable names or those authored by underground legends, find a vast collection of landscape paintings on 1stDibs.