I was browsing art on Goodwill's website, pondering writing something about the particularly unappealing sort of bland landscapes to see if I could hash out what's going on there, when I was sidetracked by something adjacent to the topic which caught my interest! Take a small journey with me!
"You know," I thought, "A lot of these paintings kinda look the same to me..."
In fact, a lot of the landscape paintings seemed to be essentially the same! I thought it'd be fun to see how many of them there were. I ended up with 47 of them!
It seems that landscape painters are obsessed with variations on this picture: a bending river in a forest, with a mountain in the center and sometimes a cabin on the right. Trees on the left and right of the river.
I've got some variant collections, too; here's 29 with a river but no mountain -
And these three with a mountain but no river, but it really looks like there ought to be a river in there.
Obviously this begs the question of why; why this specific landscape? My guess was one of three things: 1) it is a real place which is especially picturesque and thus a popular destination for landscape painters; 2) these are studies or imitations of a particular famous landscape painting; or 3) there is some sort of class or introduction to painting or composition or something which posits this landscape as a model for beginners.
My initial thought was that it could just be all by one artist, but many of them are signed by a variety of names so that would be a pretty strange and elaborate art project and seems less likely; there's also a pretty wide range of styles, skill levels, etc.
I skimmed around landscape photos on flickr and unsplash, figuring that if this is a real place, then there would certainly be a plethora of photographs depicting this iconic scene! I was not successful, though.
Turns out it's a combination of 2 and 3!
This composition - bending river, trees on either side, distant mountain in the center - is a go-to for Bob Ross in the program The Joy of Painting! That central sharp peak of a snowy mountain! The S curve of the river!
So, I think these paintings were probably made either by people following along with episodes of The Joy of Painting or by people who learned to paint from that! Isn't that sweet?
I also think there's a bit of Thomas Kinkade influence; he was big into cabins sitting on the right of a riverbend, although as you can see his compositions don't favor the central mountain like Ross. He generally avoids it, actually, positioning mountain peaks to one side or the other;
Kinkade and Ross are interesting to place next to each other, actually; the feeling of the paintings are so different despite both being USAmerican commercal landscape painters active in the 80s and 90s who are enormously popular household names.
It's interesting that they both seem to have a consistent idea for what the ideal fantasy landscape looks like and it's very similar, but they strongly disagreed about where the mountains should go. What's going on there, I wonder?
I thought that was neat.