Figures in Nature

People outdoors in fields, forests, shores and mountains, and the shifting balance between them and the land.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

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About

Pictures of people outdoors in fields, forests, shores and mountains weigh the figure against the land, and the balance tells a story. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters (1565) sets peasants working and resting in golden wheat above a wide valley, while Nicolas Poussin's Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c. 1648) lets a calm classical scene carry sudden terror.

Thomas Cole included himself as a tiny figure at his easel in The Oxbow (1836), between wilderness and farmland, and Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899) leaves a lone sailor on a dismasted boat among sharks. Utagawa Hiroshige sent travellers running through slanting rain in Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857). Later artists fused body and ground: Ana Mendieta pressed her silhouette into mud, grass and sand in the Silueta Series (1973–80), and Arno Rafael Minkkinen photographs his body merging with Finnish lakes and rocks.