Landscape In Focus. 17th to 19th-Century Prints by Western European Masters from the Collection of Lithuanian National Museum of Art
13 December 2024 – 13 April 2025
This exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover the Lithuanian National Museum of Art’s collection of foreign prints exhibited alongside the treasures from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts. The two collections of prints share a focus on the renowned masters of printmaking and their exceptional works.
Landscape as an important cultural phenomenon brings together the pieces of the exhibition into a common narrative that raises questions about the place of natural imagery in printed art, the choice of specific motifs, their meaning and significance for the composition of the artwork, and highlights the relationship between the creator and the object being depicted. The theme of landscape is also relevant in the contemporary world, where human activity is irreversibly changing the landscape around us.
In Greek Antiquity and medieval art, natural motifs were commonly used as a backdrop or a kind of stage dressing for an event or scene. An interest in the surrounding environment and its phenomena developed with Renaissance artists inspired by the ideas of Francis of Assisi, which became the impetus for the landscape genre. In his treatise On Painting, Leonardo da Vinci shared his insights on how one should depict mountains, analysed compositions with trees, mountains and clouds, and discussed the relationship between atmosphere and the mood of an artwork. Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, upon returning from his travels in Italy, created his series of Great Landscapes inspired by the Alpine mountains he saw. In it, the artist revealed a possibility for a new way of looking at the majesty of nature and the mystery of divine creation. Albrecht Dürer, the painter and printmaker, carefully studied landscape as a way to better understand the world around us. In the 17th century, landscape began to function as an autonomous art genre. Entire epochs of the dissemination of the landscape as a genre – Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism – were closely associated with active forms of world discovery – pilgrimage, travel and education. One would travel outside of the familiar space of their own country to distant and exotic, remote or dreamt-of countries, with the aim of seeing and experiencing the places, monuments and romanticised ruins that mark the great events in history with their own eyes. At this time, landscape in art took on the most varied forms: from realistic to symbolic, from idealistic to visionary. The elements of nature, the changing of the seasons have become the setting for many mythological and biblical stories. The image of Rome as the Eternal City was consolidated through the Grand Tour as the centre of intellectual and international exchange.
The exhibition is structured around four thematic blocks: The Landscape of Symbols, The Attentive Gaze: A Window to Nature, The Longing for Landscape, and The Urban Landscape: From Topography to a Vision, which reveal different representations of landscape in the engravings of old masters. The exhibition explores different types of landscape and views of nature, ranging from a small charming picture in the background of a composition to a huge panorama, or from a captured fleeting moment in the life of a plant to a grand vision of eternity. The alternating macro- and micro- points of view reveal new problematic aspects of the chosen topic. The exhibition includes single prints and illustrations, prints from albums and folders, thematic series, botanical atlases and drawing guides. This exhibition features a wide range of works by Western European artists: the famous Dutch, German, Italian and French engravers, whose editions of prints were popular and sought-after, and were the pride of library collections and print rooms.
The majority of the works on display in the exhibition consist of reproduction print plates, which not only convey the famous paintings and original compositions by famous artists, but are also important from the point of view of the development of engraving, the improvement of technology and the mastery of technique. The incentive to constantly expand the limited arsenal of graphic tools (wood and copper plates, smoothed stone surfaces, rasps, chisels, nitric acid, rosin grains etc.) to convey the natural reality and the compositions of paintings in a powerful way through line, tone, and, later on, colour, accelerated the advancement in the fields of science, art, and technology, and their convergence, as well as the close co-operation of artists. In the printmaking workshop, the artists worked together with engravers, painters of the original artworks supervising the process, printers and publishers. Many different printmaking techniques and new ways of rendering images emerged.
Curators: Jolita Liškevičienė, Ilona Mažeikienė
Coordinators: Skaistė Marčienė, Aurelija Malinauskaitė
Architect Jurgis Dagelis
Designer Marius Žalneravičius
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour of this exhibition by phone +370 46 410 421, email domsaicio.edukacija@lndm.lt
- Plan your visit to the Pranas Domšaitis Gallery
33 Liepu st, LT-92145, Klaipėda, Lithuania
++370 46 410 412
domsaicio.galerija@lndm.lt
