Landscape painting became its style during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, when religious art became less popular in a Protestant society. In Europe, landscapes went from being the backgrounds of portraits of wealthy landowners to being a highly regarded art form. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic painters made the natural world have symbolic and mythical meanings as a reaction to the scientific advances of the Enlightenment.

At the beginning of the 19th century, landscape painting became the most popular type of American art. It showed idealized images of a vast, untouched wilderness, which reflected a country whose identity and belief in its endless possibilities was deeply tied to its natural environment. As the American frontier moved further west, landscape artists painted pictures of the disappearing wilderness and the growing presence of modern civilization. These paintings either showed their patrons how significant industrial development was or reminded them of what progress costs.

Thomas Cole started the Hudson River School in the second half of the 19th century. Its artists made huge paintings that tried to show the vastness of the American landscape and encourage people to look at its beauty. Albert Bierstadt and some of the other Hudson River School artists did works that focused more on the raw, scary power of nature. In the 1870s, Thomas Moran's paintings of the Yellowstone River helped Congress decide to make the area around Yellowstone a national park.

By the start of the 20th century, romantic views of nature were replaced by urbanization themes and a longing for the quiet of untouched natural spaces. In the 1920s, Robert Henri led a group of New York artists called the "Ashcan School" or "Urban Realists," who painted scenes of dirty cities. The Regionalist Painters were a group of artists who did most of their work in the Midwest in the 1930s. They included Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Marvin Cone, and less well-known artists. Their portraits praised the work and way of life of rural agrarian America.

European art movements like abstract expressionism and cubism have influenced how modern American artists have painted landscapes. Charles Sheeler painted industrial landscapes in a style that foreshadowed photorealism. Edward Hopper painted urban and rural landscapes in a looser, more painterly style. Georgia O'Keeffe did works that turned the natural world into organic abstractions. Milton Avery's minimalist style led to the pure color fields.