Notes · History of ArtUK · A-Levels

Theme: Nature in art and architecture

Nature is one of the three themes of Paper 1 Section B, studied across different cultures, periods and media through named works. This topic traces how art has represented and used the natural world: the rise of landscape as a genre, the Romantic idea of the sublime, the observation of nature and its treatment in cultures beyond the West, and nature's place in architecture, the garden and modern Land art. The aim is a comparative understanding - how and why different times and places have looked at nature so differently - built on secure knowledge of specific works.

5 sections~24 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0555 / 12

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge of works treating nature across cultures, periods and mediaAO2 · Analyse and compare how nature is represented and used, developing a critical response

Operators:compareanalysetracecontextualiseinterpretevaluate

basic level

AS-Level requires knowledge of the theme in a more limited range of examples.

higher level

The full A-Level requires the theme traced comparatively across cultures, periods and media with named works and secure analysis.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Theme: Nature in art and architecture

Nature as a theme across cultures and periods#

FoundationPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Nature)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Nature in art across the periods

Fig. 1Attitudes to nature across the periods - from a symbolic background, through ideal and naturalistic landscape and the Romantic sublime, to Impressionist light and modern Land art.

Nature has been one of the great subjects of art in every culture, but what 'nature' has meant, and how and why it has been represented, has varied enormously - and it is precisely this variety that the theme asks you to explore. Nature can be a setting, a subject in its own right, a source of symbols, an object of scientific study, a manifestation of the divine, a mirror of human feeling, or a thing to be shaped and controlled. Studying nature as a theme means tracing these different attitudes across the centuries and across cultures, and asking what each reveals about the society that held it. The theme is examined comparatively, so breadth of well-chosen, named examples matters.

In the Western tradition, the depiction of the natural world was for a long time subordinate: in medieval and much Renaissance art, landscape appeared mainly as a background to religious and human subjects, and nature was of interest chiefly for what it meant (as God's creation, or as a store of symbols) rather than for itself. Only gradually did the natural world become worthy of depiction in its own right, with the rise of landscape as an independent genre - a development, traced in the next section, that reflects deep shifts in how European society regarded nature, from a subordinate backdrop to a central subject.

The range of attitudes to nature that art records is strikingly wide, and a few contrasts orient the whole theme. Nature can be idealised into an ordered, harmonious paradise (the classical landscape) or confronted in its wild, overwhelming power (the Romantic sublime); it can be observed with scientific precision (botanical illustration, the naturalist's eye) or dissolved into an impression of light and atmosphere (the Impressionists); it can be revered as sacred and infused with spirit (Chinese landscape, Romantic pantheism) or exploited and reshaped by human design (the garden, the modern engineering of the land). Holding these contrasting attitudes in mind gives you the conceptual map onto which specific works can be placed.

Nature as a theme is also inseparable from changing ideas about the relationship between humanity and the natural world, which is what gives the theme its depth. Whether nature is seen as a paradise, a wilderness, a resource, a temple or a threatened environment reflects a whole worldview, and the history of nature in art is in part a history of how human beings have understood their place in the world - as its masters, its worshippers, its observers or, latterly, its endangerers. This is why the theme reaches beyond painting into architecture, the garden and contemporary environmental art, and why it connects so readily to context and meaning.

For the examination, the key is to build a repertoire of specific, well-understood works from different cultures, periods and media, and to be ready to compare them thematically. A strong answer does not simply list examples but sets them against one another to illuminate the theme - contrasting, say, the sublime terror of a Turner storm with the serene reverence of a Chinese landscape, or the naturalism of Constable with the light-effects of Monet - drawing out how and why the treatment of nature differs. The sections that follow supply the main strands and named examples on which such comparison can be built.

Worked example

Mapping attitudes to nature

Show how three works embody three different attitudes to nature.

The ideal
A seventeenth-century classical landscape by Claude Lorrain presents nature as an ordered, golden, harmonious paradise, idealised and composed - nature perfected.
The sublime
A Turner storm or an Alpine scene presents nature as vast, wild and overwhelming, dwarfing humanity - nature as awe-inspiring power.
The observed
A Constable landscape presents the specific English countryside with naturalistic fidelity to weather, light and place - nature closely observed and loved for itself.
Compare
The three show nature idealised, nature as sublime power, and nature naturalistically observed - three worldviews about the natural world, revealed by comparison.

Result: Three works are placed as ideal, sublime and observed treatments of nature, demonstrating the comparative, attitude-mapping approach the theme requires.

Typical mistakes

Treating 'nature' as one fixed idea rather than a concept whose meaning changes across cultures and periods.
Listing examples without comparing them thematically to illuminate how and why treatments of nature differ.

Active revision

List five works treating nature from different periods, cultures and media, and for each state in one sentence the attitude to nature it embodies; then pick two to contrast.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Landscape: the rise of a genre#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Nature: landscape)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Approaches to landscape

Fig. 2Approaches to landscape - from the topographical and the ideal/classical, through the naturalistic and the sublime, to the Impressionist pursuit of light.

One of the central stories of nature in Western art is the rise of landscape from a subordinate background to an independent and eventually a leading genre - a development that took several centuries and reflected profound changes in how nature was valued. In the traditional academic hierarchy of genres, landscape ranked low, below history painting and portraiture, on the reasoning that it merely copied nature rather than inventing noble compositions. Its slow ascent to prominence, and ultimately its role as a vehicle for some of the most ambitious painting of the nineteenth century, is a major theme in its own right.

The independent landscape emerged strongly in two seventeenth-century forms. In the Protestant Dutch Republic, painters produced realistic landscapes of the flat, watery Netherlands - Jacob van Ruisdael's expansive skies and woodlands are celebrated examples - painted for a middle-class market that wanted images of its own land. In Italy and France, meanwhile, the classical or ideal landscape was developed above all by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin: carefully composed, golden, harmonious scenes, often with small classical or biblical figures, presenting an idealised nature ordered by art. These two seventeenth-century modes - the naturalistic and the ideal - set up a lasting tension in landscape painting between fidelity to observed nature and its idealisation.

The nineteenth century made landscape a major genre and a vehicle for powerful ideas, above all in Britain. John Constable devoted himself to the truthful depiction of the specific English countryside he knew, studying weather, light and cloud with near-scientific attention and painting fresh oil sketches directly from nature; his large finished canvases such as 'The Hay Wain' (1821) monumentalised the ordinary rural scene. J. M. W. Turner, by contrast, pushed landscape toward the dramatic and the sublime, and increasingly toward near-abstraction, dissolving storms, light and atmosphere into luminous veils of paint. Between them, Constable and Turner raised landscape to the front rank and pointed toward later developments.

Landscape also carried meaning beyond the depiction of places, and part of analysing the genre is reading what a landscape is really about. A landscape can express national identity and attachment to the land (Constable's beloved Suffolk), religious or philosophical ideas (a Friedrich landscape as a meditation on God and mortality), social realities (the labour or the emptiness of the countryside), or pure sensation (the Impressionists' light). The genre that once ranked lowest because it 'merely copied' nature proved capable of carrying the deepest meanings, and reading a landscape means asking not only what place it shows but what idea of nature, and of humanity's place in it, it embodies.

By the later nineteenth century landscape had become the natural home of the avant-garde's experiments with perception and paint. The Impressionists took the practice of painting outdoors, before the motif, to its conclusion, making the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape their central subject - Monet's series of the same haystacks or his water-garden at Giverny pursued light itself across the surface of nature. In landscape, more than any other genre, the observation of nature and the exploration of painting fused, which is why the rise of landscape is bound up with the wider story of nineteenth-century art's turn toward light, sensation and, eventually, abstraction.

Worked example

Analysing Constable's naturalism

Analyse how a Constable landscape such as 'The Hay Wain' (1821) treats nature.

The subject
It depicts a specific, ordinary corner of the Suffolk countryside Constable knew - a mill, a river, a cart - the everyday rural England he loved.
The method
Constable studied weather, light and cloud closely and worked from fresh oil sketches made outdoors, seeking naturalistic fidelity to the look and feel of a particular place and moment.
The meaning
By monumentalising an ordinary rural scene at large scale, he dignified the familiar English landscape and expressed a deep attachment to place and to a way of rural life.
Compare
Against an idealised Claude or a sublime Turner, Constable represents the naturalistic strand - nature closely observed and loved for its specific, ordinary truth.

Result: Constable's landscape is analysed as naturalistic observation carrying an attachment to place, and located against the ideal and sublime strands - the comparative reading of the genre.

Typical mistakes

Treating landscape as a straightforward record of scenery, missing the ideas (national, religious, perceptual) it can carry.
Conflating Constable's naturalism with Turner's sublime drama - they represent contrasting directions within the genre.

Active revision

Compare a Dutch or Constable naturalistic landscape with a Claude ideal landscape, analysing how each treats nature and what idea of nature it embodies.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

The sublime and Romantic nature#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Nature: the sublime)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The beautiful and the sublime

Fig. 3Burke's distinction: the beautiful (small, smooth, delicate, pleasing) versus the sublime (vast, rugged, powerful, awe-inspiring) - two aesthetic responses to nature.

The idea of the sublime is one of the most important concepts for the theme of nature, because it names a whole way of experiencing and representing the natural world that dominated the Romantic era. The sublime is the quality of overwhelming greatness, power or terror - the vast, the mighty, the boundless - that inspires awe mixed with a kind of pleasurable fear. The philosopher Edmund Burke, in his 'Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' (1757), influentially distinguished the sublime from the beautiful: the beautiful is small, smooth, delicate and gives pleasure, whereas the sublime is vast, rugged, powerful and even terrifying, and gives a stronger, deeper emotion of awe. This distinction shaped how artists represented nature.

The sublime made the wild and overwhelming aspects of nature - storms, mountains, avalanches, oceans, the infinite sky - a central subject, precisely because they produced that awe-mixed-with-terror. Where the beautiful or the ideal landscape offered harmony and repose, the sublime landscape confronted the viewer with nature's overwhelming scale and power, before which humanity is small and helpless. This was a profound shift in sensibility: mountains, once regarded as ugly and frightening obstacles, became objects of awe and pilgrimage, and the wildness that classical taste had shunned became the highest source of feeling.

In Britain, J. M. W. Turner was the supreme painter of the sublime, subjecting tiny human figures and vessels to the fury of storms, avalanches and the sea, and dissolving the natural world into overwhelming vortices of light, colour and atmosphere. In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a more contemplative, spiritual sublime, placing small solitary figures before vast landscapes - his 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (c.1818) sets a lone man on a peak gazing over an infinite, mist-filled expanse - so that nature becomes a mirror for meditation on the individual, the infinite and the divine. The sublime could be violent (Turner) or contemplative (Friedrich), but always it confronted humanity with something greater than itself.

The sublime is inseparable from the wider Romantic attitude to nature, of which it is the most intense expression. Romanticism, reacting against Enlightenment reason and order, exalted emotion, imagination, the individual and, above all, nature - not the tamed, ordered nature of the classical garden but wild, untamed, spiritually charged nature, in which the Romantics found feeling, freedom, the divine and a mirror of the soul. Nature became a source of spiritual and emotional truth and a refuge from the artificial, mechanising modern world, and the landscape became a vehicle for the deepest feelings and ideas - a transformation in the meaning of nature in art.

For analysis and comparison, the sublime gives you a powerful concept and a clear contrast to set against other attitudes to nature. A sublime landscape is analysed for how it produces awe and the sense of nature's overwhelming power - through vast scale, the smallness of any human presence, dramatic weather and light, and a composition that dwarfs and unsettles. Setting the Romantic sublime against the classical ideal (order versus overwhelming power), against Constable's gentler naturalism, or against the serene reverence of a Chinese landscape, brings out sharply how differently the Romantic era felt about the natural world - and comparison of this kind is exactly what the theme rewards.

Worked example

Analysing the sublime in Friedrich

Analyse how Friedrich's 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' (c.1818) produces the sublime.

Scale and the figure
A single small figure stands on a rocky peak, seen from behind, gazing out over a vast expanse of mist-filled mountains stretching to the horizon.
The effect of vastness
The immensity of the misty landscape dwarfs the solitary man, confronting him - and us - with nature's boundless scale, the essence of the sublime.
The contemplative mood
Because we see the figure from behind, we share his contemplation; the scene becomes a meditation on the individual before the infinite, and on the spiritual and the divine in nature.
Conclude
Through vast scale, the tiny contemplative figure and the boundless misty expanse, the work produces the awe of the sublime and turns nature into a mirror for the soul.

Result: Friedrich's work is analysed as a contemplative sublime, producing awe through vastness and the dwarfed, contemplative figure - the Romantic experience of nature made visible.

Typical mistakes

Using 'sublime' loosely to mean 'beautiful' - the sublime is specifically the vast, powerful and awe-inspiring, distinct from the beautiful.
Treating Romantic nature as mere scenery, missing its charge of emotion, spirituality and reaction against the modern world.

Active revision

Analyse a Turner or Friedrich sublime landscape, explaining how scale, the human figure, weather and composition produce awe; then contrast it with a classical ideal landscape.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Nature across cultures and the observation of nature#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Nature across cultures)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Chinese and European landscape

Fig. 4Two traditions revering nature by opposite means: Chinese landscape (ink, mobile viewpoint, active empty space, philosophical) and European landscape (oil, fixed perspective, framed illusion).

Because the theme is studied across cultures, it is essential to see that the Western landscape tradition is only one of the world's ways of representing nature, and that other cultures have developed rich and quite different approaches. The most important comparison for many students is the Chinese landscape tradition, which developed a profound art of nature centuries before the independent Western landscape and on entirely different principles. Understanding a non-Western tradition on its own terms - rather than judging it by Western conventions of naturalistic representation - is exactly the cross-cultural understanding the theme demands.

Chinese landscape painting (the genre is called shan shui, 'mountain-water') treats nature as the supreme subject and as an expression of philosophical and spiritual truth rather than a topographical record. Rooted in Daoist and other traditions that revere nature as the manifestation of a cosmic order, the great landscapes of the Song dynasty present towering mountains, rivers and mists in which tiny human figures are absorbed into a vast, harmonious natural whole - Fan Kuan's early-eleventh-century 'Travellers among Mountains and Streams' and Guo Xi's 'Early Spring' (1072) are celebrated examples. The painter did not usually work from a single fixed viewpoint or seek exact likeness, but built up an ideal, contemplative vision of nature, often uniting painting with poetry and calligraphy in the tradition of the scholar-artist.

Comparing the Chinese and European traditions is highly instructive, because both revere nature deeply yet represent it in almost opposite ways. Both make nature a great and meaningful subject and can dwarf the human within it, but the Chinese tradition uses ink, a mobile rather than fixed viewpoint, empty space (the unpainted silk or paper) as an active element suggesting mist and the infinite, and a contemplative, philosophical ideal, whereas the Western tradition typically uses oil, fixed one-point perspective, a filled and framed illusion, and either naturalistic observation or dramatic emotion. The comparison shows vividly that there is no single 'correct' way to paint nature, and that each tradition's means express its own understanding of the natural world.

Alongside these idealising and expressive traditions runs the impulse to observe nature closely and record it accurately, which has its own long history. From Renaissance studies of plants and animals (Leonardo's and Dürer's meticulous nature studies) to the great tradition of botanical and natural-history illustration, art has served the scientific observation and classification of the natural world, valuing precise, detailed accuracy. This observational strand fed back into the fine arts - Constable's near-scientific study of clouds, the naturalists' precision - and it reminds us that representing nature has been, among other things, a way of knowing it. The tension between observing nature and idealising or expressing it runs through the whole theme.

In the modern era, photography added a powerful new medium for the representation of nature, and it too spans the observational and the expressive. Landscape photography can document the natural world with mechanical precision, but in the hands of an artist such as Ansel Adams - whose majestic black-and-white photographs of the American West and of Yosemite combine sharp detail with a carefully controlled tonal drama - it becomes a means of expressing the grandeur and even the sublimity of nature, and of arguing for its preservation. Across cultures and media, then, the representation of nature ranges from precise observation to philosophical idealisation to sublime emotion, and comparing these approaches - Chinese and European, observed and expressive, painted and photographed - is the heart of the theme.

Worked example

Comparing across cultures

Compare how a Chinese Song-dynasty landscape and a European Romantic landscape represent the relationship of humanity to nature.

The Chinese landscape
A monumental shan shui landscape absorbs tiny travellers into a vast, harmonious natural order, using ink, a mobile viewpoint and active empty space to express a contemplative, philosophical vision of nature.
The European landscape
A Romantic landscape such as a Friedrich sets a solitary figure before an overwhelming vista, using oil and a fixed viewpoint to produce the awe of the sublime and a charged emotional confrontation with nature.
The shared theme
Both dwarf the human within a great nature and invest the natural world with deep meaning - nature is far more than scenery in each.
The difference
But the Chinese work expresses serene absorption into a cosmic harmony, the European work an emotional confrontation with sublime power - different understandings of nature expressed by different means.

Result: The two traditions are compared as reverence for nature expressed by opposite means and worldviews - harmonious absorption versus sublime confrontation - the cross-cultural analysis the theme rewards.

Typical mistakes

Judging Chinese landscape by Western standards of fixed-viewpoint naturalism and so misunderstanding its aims.
Overlooking non-Western and photographic treatments of nature, narrowing the theme to Western painting.

Active revision

Compare a Song-dynasty Chinese landscape with a European Romantic or naturalistic one, analysing how each represents nature and what understanding of nature its means express.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Nature in architecture, the garden and Land art#

AdvancedPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 1 Section B (Nature and the made)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Nature and human making

Fig. 5Beyond depiction: art's direct engagement with nature through the garden, architecture and Land art - from controlling nature to merging with it.

Because the theme covers architecture as well as the fine arts, and different media, it reaches beyond the representation of nature into the ways human making engages, shapes and incorporates the natural world. Three great instances - the designed landscape of the garden, the relationship of buildings to nature, and modern art that works directly in and with the land - extend the theme and offer rich material for comparison with painted nature. In each, nature is not depicted but handled directly, so the questions shift from representation to relationship: how does human design cooperate with, control, or merge into nature?

The garden is one of the oldest and most revealing arts of nature, because it shapes living nature itself into an expression of a culture's ideals. Different cultures have designed gardens on opposite principles: the formal French garden of the seventeenth century (supremely at Versailles) imposed geometry, symmetry and control on nature, expressing human mastery and absolutist order; the eighteenth-century English landscape garden (associated with designers such as Lancelot 'Capability' Brown) rejected that formality for sweeping, apparently natural lawns, lakes and clumps of trees, an idealised, artfully 'natural' scenery reflecting new tastes for the picturesque. The garden thus makes visible, in living form, whether a culture seeks to dominate nature or to idealise and harmonise with it.

Architecture's relationship to nature is a further strand, ranging from the building that dominates its site to the building that merges with it. The most celebrated modern example of an architecture seeking harmony with nature is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (1935), a house built out over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, its cantilevered concrete terraces echoing the rock ledges and its interior opening to the stream and trees - Wright's 'organic architecture', which sought to integrate building and landscape into a single whole. Set against buildings that stand as geometric objects imposed on their sites, Fallingwater exemplifies one pole of architecture's engagement with nature: not to conquer the site but to belong to it.

In the later twentieth century, artists began to work directly in and with the natural landscape, in the movement known as Land art or Earth art, dispensing with representation altogether. Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), a huge coil of rock and earth built out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the ephemeral works of Andy Goldsworthy, made from ice, leaves, stone and other natural materials and often left to decay, take the natural world itself as both site and material. Land art raises new questions about nature: about scale and time, about the human mark on the landscape, about permanence and decay, and increasingly about the environment and its fragility - concerns that connect the ancient theme of nature to the most contemporary anxieties.

Taken together, these instances complete the theme by showing that art's engagement with nature is not only a matter of pictures but of gardens, buildings and direct interventions in the land, and they offer especially rich comparisons. The formal versus the landscape garden, the building that dominates versus the one that merges, the monumental permanence of Spiral Jetty versus the deliberate transience of a Goldsworthy - each pairing dramatises a different attitude to nature and humanity's place in it. And in the environmental turn of recent art, the theme of nature acquires a new urgency, as artists respond to a natural world now seen as threatened. Bringing architecture, the garden and Land art into the comparison, alongside painting and photography across cultures and periods, is what makes for a genuinely wide-ranging and high-scoring treatment of the theme.

Worked example

Comparing two attitudes in the garden

Compare the formal French garden and the English landscape garden as expressions of attitudes to nature.

The formal French garden
At Versailles, nature is subjected to strict geometry - symmetrical parterres, straight avenues, clipped hedges and controlled water - imposing human order on the natural world.
Its meaning
This expresses mastery and absolutist order: nature disciplined into a rational, controlled pattern that mirrors the power of the king who commanded it.
The English landscape garden
The eighteenth-century English garden rejects this for sweeping lawns, serpentine lakes and artfully placed clumps of trees, creating an apparently natural, idealised scenery.
Its meaning
This expresses a new taste for the natural and picturesque and an ideal of harmony with, rather than domination of, nature - though the 'natural' effect is itself carefully designed.

Result: The two garden types are compared as opposite attitudes - controlling nature versus idealising and harmonising with it - extending the theme of nature into the designed landscape.

Typical mistakes

Restricting the theme to painted representations of nature, ignoring architecture, the garden and Land art that the theme includes.
Treating the formal and landscape garden, or dominating and merging architecture, as the same rather than as opposite attitudes to nature.

Active revision

Compare a formal French garden and an English landscape garden, or a dominating building and Wright's Fallingwater, analysing what attitude to nature each embodies.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

Pearson Edexcel

Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art

Theme: Nature in art and architecture

5 sections~24 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Theme: Nature in art and architecture

Key points

Mapping attitudes to nature

Key points

Analysing Constable's naturalism

Key points

Analysing the sublime in Friedrich

Key points

Comparing across cultures

Key points

Comparing two attitudes in the garden

Sources

Theme: Nature in art and architecture

Key points

Mapping attitudes to nature

Key points

Analysing Constable's naturalism

Key points

Analysing the sublime in Friedrich

Key points

Comparing across cultures

Key points

Comparing two attitudes in the garden

Sources