A landscape such as this one by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes is benevolent, tame, calm, still and orderly. It invokes a feeling of serenity:
But a string of verbs apply to landscape as we know it to be. Water evaporates and precipitates, freezes and thaws, flows and surges. Plants grope for dissolved nutrients, erupt from soil and compete for the space and light they need. Hills and savage mountains are pushed up by the same ponderous forces that crack open canyons under the sea.
If she or he should want to, how does an artist go about capturing some of this action to put into a still picture? One way is to paint a storm. This one is by Winslow Homer:
Here is a successful and more subtle solution by Peter Paul Rubens. The slanting light suggests the change from day into night; some of the tree trunks and branches are reminiscent of the shape of a bolt of lightning; bright and deeply shaded areas are distributed across the surface of the picture so as to imply restlessness and motion:
Jacob van Ruysdael has gone all out. Clouds billow and roil, water tumbles and froths, trees strain towards the sky. As with Rubens, there is no sizable area of calm.
El Greco gives us energy bordering on apocalypse. The fragile-looking buildings of the city almost look as though they are being chewed up and devoured by the irresistible forces of nature:
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