Did you know that there was a point in art history when ‘landscape’ was viewed purely as a device for constructing figurative paintings, not its own genre - be they portraiture, mythological, or religious? Tonalism emerged in 1880s America, after artists were inspired by the work of the Barbizon painters from the 1840s in France, who worked by venturing out into the countryside around Paris to paint from their environment. The Tonalists admired their human desire to convey personal experience ov