Waterfall

Waterfall is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Thomas Cole and Gustave Courbet.

The waterfall is one of the oldest motifs in landscape art, and its earliest sustained treatment belongs to China. In the shan shui ("mountain-water") tradition that matured under the Tang (618–907) and Song dynasties, water and mountains were the two indispensable elements of a painting, and the cascade carried deep meaning: shaped by Taoist thought, which held mountains to be sacred dwellings near the heavens, painters rendered humans as mere specks before the vast, ceaseless flow of nature. The convention spread across East Asia, informing the Japanese sansui tradition for centuries.

In Europe the waterfall became a subject in its own right only in the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Allart van Everdingen, who travelled to Scandinavia in 1644, brought home drawings of rocky torrents utterly unlike the flat Low Countries; his work inspired Jacob van Ruisdael, who from the 1660s produced brooding, dramatic waterfall landscapes—such as A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape—despite never having seen such terrain, studying instead the surging sluices and watermills around Amsterdam. The motif suited the Romantic taste for the sublime, and reached a peak of invention in Japan with Katsushika Hokusai's A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces (c. 1833), the first ukiyo-e series devoted to falling water, in which the cascade fills the sheet and dwarfs its human figures.

The nineteenth century made the waterfall a national symbol in America. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, and his pupil Frederic Edwin Church treated wild water as evidence of divine grandeur; Church's monumental Niagara (1857) drew over 100,000 paying viewers and astonished audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The school's panoramic ambition is visible in works our collection holds, including Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, Thomas Doughty's Fanciful Landscape, and Cole's allegorical The Titan's Goblet.

In France, Gustave Courbet bent the theme toward Realism. Rejecting the sublime, he painted grottoes and cascades he had actually seen—the Source of the Lison among them—and pictures such as The Source, where a bather embraces falling water. From sacred Chinese peaks to François Boucher's Rococo Washerwomen, the waterfall has remained a perennial test of an artist's power to make water live.