The landscape provided a meditative retreat from the complexities of the budding century, at times also supplying a subject for formal investigations. Trees shimmer in Vittore Grubicy de Dragon's Divisionist Arcadia Winter in the Mountains, a Pantheist Poem: Morning (1900); become grid-like in Piet Mondrian's elliptical Pollard Willows on the Gein (1902-04); and dissolve into violet mist in Claude Monet's Morning on the Seine (1897). The landscape was also a locus for nationalist impulses, from the Icelandic ponies on Thorárinn B. Thorláksson's Nordic lava plain in Thingvellir (1900) to the ancestral Pueblo dwellings of Thomas Moran's Southwestern panorama Cliff Dwellers (1899), an image symbolic of the American frontier.

Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Winter in the Mountains, a Pantheist Poem: Morning, 1900. Oil on canvas, 75 x 56 cm. Civica Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Milan. Photo by Saporetti.