Learning to Draw Landscape in Nineteenth-Century France

Although landscape painting became a major genre in nineteenth-century art, it was not taught in French art schools. This essay traces the development of landscape pedagogy in the production of drawing manuals for the use of artists. Beginning as botanicals featuring schematic drawings of trees, these drawings developed into detailed studies delineating each landscape element in progressive steps, to be combined into completed works. Another set of manuals provided genre vignettes to enliven the landscape. Despite the widespread use and dissemination of these manuals throughout Europe and the Americas, artists consistently disavowed them, claiming that they had no master other than nature.