nature - The material world and its phenomena, laws, beauties, etc., especially those parts remaining in a primitive, untouched state, unchanged by humans.

Definitions of art invariably exclude untouched nature, and yet it has been among the most important subjects for artists. Nature has been the principal subject of artists depicting landscapes, seascapes, and animalia, along with much still life; and it is the primary medium as well as subject of those making earth art. Although nature has been important to artists of all periods and movements, it has been especially important to those involved in Romanticism and Naturalism.

Nature was banished from the work of painters producing the geometric images of De Stijl. Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944), the group's leading figure, said he would not permit anything green into his studio!

Examples:

Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528), A Young Hare, 1502, 25 x 23 cm, watercolor and body color on paper, Graphische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna. See Northern Renaissance.

Albrecht Dürer, The Large Turf, 1503, watercolor and gouache on paper, 41 x 32 cm, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

Albrecht Dürer, Wing of a Roller, 1512, watercolor and gouache on vellum, 20 x 20 cm, Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. Also see feather.

A Painter ot the Kano School, (Japanese, active 1596-1614), Falcon on Oak Tree Watching Monkeys, six-panel folding screen; ink and light color on paper; no signature; interpolated jar-shaped kuninobu seal of Kano Eitoku (1543-90), Worcester Art Museum, MA. See Edo period and landscape.

Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628-1682), Dune Landscape with Oak Tree, 1650-55, black chalk, brush and gray wash and gouache, framing lines in pen and brown ink, 8 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches (21.0 x 19.1 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See landscape.

Maria Sibylla Merian, (German, 1647-1717), Plate 1 from Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam, second edition, 1719, hand-colored engraving on paper, 12 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732-1806), A Gathering at Woods' Edge, c. 1760-1780, red chalk, 14 3/4 x 19 3/8 inches (37.5 x 49.2 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

Nagasawa Rosetsu (Japanese, 1754-99), Bamboo, 1790s, six-panel folding screen; ink on paper; no signature; seals: (upper) Nagasawa, (lower) Gyo, Worcester Art Museum, MA. See bamboo, Edo period, and landscape.

John James Audubon (American, 1785-1851), Douglass' Squirrel, a study for pl. 48 of Viviparous Quadripeds of North America by John James Audubon and Rev. John Bachman (New York: John James Audubon, published 1845-1848), c. 1843, watercolor, ink, graphite, and glaze on wove paper, 12 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches (310 x 242 mm), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA.

Asher B. Durand (American, 1796-1886), Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches, New York Public Library. Durand represented the naturalistic strain of America's Hudson River School. Kindred Spirits is a portrait in nature of the painter Thomas Cole with his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant.

William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942), Old Faithful, Wyoming, 1870, albumen print, 20 3/16 x 16 3/4 inches (51.4 x 42.5 cm), J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

John Singer Sargent (American, born in Italy, 1856-1925), Muddy Alligators, 1917, watercolor over graphite on off-white wove paper, Worcester Art Museum, MA.

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), Pink Shell with Seaweed, c. 1937, 22 x 28 inches, pastel on paper, San Diego Museum of Art, CA. See volute.

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Ant, 1943, lithograph, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. See optical illusion.

Zhang Yuan (Chinese), Autumn Flowers, 1948, ink and color on paper, Phoenix Art Museum, AZ. See botanical and Republican period.

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Puddle, 1952, woodcut in three colors, 24 x 31.9 cm (9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches).

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Three Worlds, 1955, lithograph, 36.2 x 24.7 cm (14 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches).

Walton Ford (American, 1960-), Falling Bough, 2002, watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper, 60 3/4 x 119 1/2 inches, private collection, TN.

• "Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish."
  Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE), Greek philosopher.
  
  
• "Nature is the art of God."
  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet, whose masterpiece was The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321. De Monarchia, 1321.
  
  
• "It is a sign of decadence to find one's reference in art instead of in nature."
  Leonardo da Vinci (14552-1519), Italian Renaissance artist. Treatise on Painting, 1651.
  
  
• "All works of nature created by God in heaven and on earth are works of sculpture."
  Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), Italian goldsmith and sculptor, in Il Trattato dell' Oreficeria e della Scultura, edited by Carlo Milanesi.
  
  
• "Painting cannot equal nature for the marvels of mountains and water, but nature cannot equal painting for the marvels of brush and ink."
  Tung-Ch'i-chang (1555-1636), Chinese painter.
  
  
• "Nature yields herself to those who trouble to explore her. But she demands an exclusive love. The works of art we love, we love only because they are derived from her. The rest are merely works of empty pedantry."
  Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), French Barbizon painter, precursor to the Realist school.
  
  
• "It is written on the arched sky. It looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature. It is that which uplifts the spirit within us."
  John Ruskin (1819-1900), British writer, art critic. Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-1860, epilogue, 1888). See art critic.
  
  
• "Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature."
  Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French Impressionist. Notebook, 1858.
  
  
• "You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat."
  Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1914), French Impressionist painter.
  
  
• "A thing in Nature becomes much lovelier if it reminds us of a thing in Art, but a thing in Art gains no real beauty through reminding us of a thing in Nature. The primary aesthetic impression of a work of art borrows nothing from recognition or resemblance."
  Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish born writer, responding to a critic. See aestheticism.
  
  
• “Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.... It also includes the inner pictures of the soul.”
  Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norwegian artist. See Expressionism.
  
  
• "We live our lives in tune with nature when we are happy. And all our misery is the result of our effort to dictate against nature."
  Robert Henri (1865-1929), American painter, one of The Eight and a member of the Ashcan school. The Art Spirit, 1923.
  
  
  
• "Art will never be able to exist without nature."
  Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), French painter. See Intimisme.
  
  
• "The more delicate the thing is in nature, the more one must look for the solemn note. Color in nature is never pretty, it's beautiful."
  Charles Hawthorne (1872-1930), American painter and educator. Hawthorne on Painting, 1938.
  
  
• "For the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space."
  Paul Klee (1879-1940), Swiss painter, taught at the Bauhaus. "Paths of the Study of Nature" (in the Yearbook of the Staatliche Bauhaus, Weimar, 1919-1923; reprinted in The Pedagogical Sketchbook, 1953).
  
  
• "Through art we express our conception of what nature is not."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. "Picasso Speaks," in The Arts (New York, May 1923; reprinted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, 1946).
  
  
• "When I'm finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art."
  Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Russian-French painter, graphic artist. Saturday Evening Post, December 2, 1962.
  
  
• "Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers -- and never succeeding."
  Marc Chagall.
  
  
• "Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model."
  Northrop Frye (1912-1991), Canadian literary critic, Fables of Identity, 1963; quoted in Stephen Vizinczey, Truth and Lies in Literature, "Rules of the Game," 1986.

Also see suiseki.

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