In this alphabet of landscape painting there are several strong contenders for the letter v. Volcanoes make for thrilling views, but are unusual apart from those of Vesuvius. Views of Venice, or vedute, have become a specialist sub-genre in their own right. I have therefore chosen the more general theme of valleys instead.
Two approaches have been popular to make the valley the theme of a landscape painting, depending on the viewpoint chosen. If the artist decides to paint from within the valley, then they will de-emphasise its surrounding uplands. If the chosen viewpoint is above the valley, then any surrounding hills will naturally appear distant and subsidiary.
JC Dahl's Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 opts for the former technique, its hills made vague and shrouded in low cloud, and the valley in the foreground painted in higher chroma and greater detail. Dahl had to employ a little deception as this church had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time, so substituted the stave church at Vang, which was demolished shortly afterwards. Dahl stepped in and had it rebuilt in the Silesian Mountains for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
Frederic Edwin Church's huge masterpiece The Heart of the Andes from 1859 adopts a similar strategy, with its brightly-coloured birds and rich plant life in the foreground valley. At its heart is a cross, with two figures by it (detail below). Dressed as locals, one sits, facing the cross, while the other stands just behind the seated figure, looking in the same direction. The cross is made simply of wood, and appears to have been decorated with a floral garland. It's partly obscured by the luxuriant wayside plants.
Just four years later, Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) focussed attention on the Shoshone in the foreground, while the rugged mountain of the title is faded into the far distance.
Although the staffage in the foreground of Sidney Richard Percy's On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) appears routine, he has put similar emphasis on this valley near the market town of Crieff, on the busy road between Perth and Crianlarich. Percy's track is more remote, and probably used by Highland drovers to take their cattle to market in Crieff, then a major outlet for livestock from further north in Scotland.
Benjamin Williams Leader's In a Welsh Valley from 1909 dissolves the peaks of Snowdonia, North Wales, in vagueness, while its green valley is supersaturated.
The alternative approach of looking down on the valley is compositionally simpler, but requires careful attention to depth and perspective to avoid the valley appearing flat.
Samuel Palmer painted this view of The Golden Valley when he was living in Shoreham between about 1833-34. This looks down from the Weald of Kent just as the harvest is being brought down to the valley below.
In the summer of 1853, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany, where he painted his first masterpiece of Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany. This shows the ruins of the monastery there, and has the distinctive look of Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings in combining fine detail with an air of unreality.
This look is in part the result of the prolonged painting time to achieve the fine detail expected. Early plein air painters quickly learned that capturing a view so that it appeared natural required fast work for short periods, only an hour or two at most, in consistent lighting conditions over one or a very few sessions at the same time each day. To accomplish that, they sketched, and omitted detail. By setting himself the requirement of capturing such great detail, true to nature, Seddon made the painting process so protracted as to lose the coherent details of light, shadow, and surface effects that make a realist painting appear real.
A November Rainbow - Dolwyddelan Valley, November 11, 1866, 1 p.m. (1866) is one of Alfred William Hunt's most celebrated paintings, with its elaborate composition and rich colours. It shows the valley of the River Lledr near the hamlet of Bertheos, on the eastern side of the Snowdon range in North Wales. He too de-emphasises the distant hills and floods the valley with light and detail.
In 1885, Charles Blomfield painted the active geothermal area of Orakei Korako on the Waikato, with its geysers and hot springs. This is on the bank of New Zealand's longest river, in the North Island, and views the valley from above.
My final example is this View from the Dürnstein Ruins over the Danube Valley painted from above by Emilie Mediz-Pelikan in about 1900. In the foreground are the ruins of Dürnstein Castle, near Krems, with the River Danube below, meandering tightly from the top. She has cropped out the hills that might have distracted from her superb view of the Danube Valley.
