Veracity in landscape painting

It is broadly true to say that — in the history of western art — landscape has been subordinate to subject matter, often being little more than a ‘backdrop’ to depictions of Christian or Classical themes. And it may be said (again, in the broadest of terms) that — Dutch landscape painting apart — it was not until the late 18^th century that landscape (and seascape) painting came to be accepted as subjects in their own right. (There are exceptions, but they prove no rule: 

El Greco, View of Toledo

Brueghel the Elder, The Corn Harvesters

It took Ruskin to observe that the landscape backgrounds to most paintings before Constable and Turner consisted of ‘generalised’ rocks, flora, (and even fauna), and as he succinctly 

says: It is just as impossible to generalise granite and slate, as it is to generalise a man and a cow; an animal must either be one animal or another; it cannot be general animal or it is no animal; it cannot be general rock or it is no rock…Every attempt to produce that which shall be any rock, ends in the production of no rock.

Consider, the painting below

Bernadino Butinone The Adoration of the Shepherds circa 1480. National Gallery, London

The pinkish–ochre rocks here displayed have all the appearance of some plastic artefact purchased at B&Q, and are certainly unknown to the science of geology. And then we see that some little cotton wool buds have strayed into the sky!

Well, Ruskin was perfectly right to complain about the sheer laziness of landscape painters who filled their canvases with stock images, thereby creating a falsely romantic view of nature for which a gullible public is to this day willing to pay. However, as soon as painters ceased to be concerned with the faithful representation of nature, and began to make pictures which where objects separate from the world — containing their own internal integrity, and addressing the viewer directly — then Ruskin’s strictures ceased to apply. Consider the illustration below:

Juan Gris Landscape with Houses at Ceret 1913; Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm; Galeria Theo, Madrid.

Here — in Ruskin's terms — we have no trees, no hills, no fields. But we are not concerned, because we have a richly imaginative painting in which the identification of specific species of trees is irrelevant, and the only question we need ask is: ‘Does the painting work?’