Nature

About

Nature has served artists as a model, a setting and a material. Albrecht Dürer's watercolour The Great Piece of Turf (1503) looks at a clump of grasses and weeds from ground level, treating humble growth as worth close study. In 19th-century America, Thomas Cole's The Oxbow (1836) set cultivated farmland against untamed wilderness, and Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara (1857) spread the falls across a canvas more than two metres wide. Ansel Adams later made the granite and snow of Yosemite into studies in tone.

From the 1960s artists increasingly worked with nature itself rather than pictures of it. Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking (1967) is a photograph of a path trodden into a field, and Giuseppe Penone cast his hand gripping a young tree, then left the trunk to grow around it. Designers borrowed from plants too: Tiffany Studios lamps bloom with glass wisteria and dragonflies.