Nature

Within European painting of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nature is less a neutral setting than a dense semiotic field. Trees, water, atmosphere, and cultivated land assume the status of mobile signifiers, bearing inherited iconographic associations while registering new concerns with optical modernity and social change. In this period, the older pastoral opposition between nature and culture breaks down: landscapes are structured like architecture, cities dissolve into meteorological events, and gardens are treated as laboratories of perception. The symbols in this category chart that evolution, revealing how painters from Manet to Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, and Renoir re-script nature as both subject and medium of meaning.

Cézanne’s Bathers provides a concentrated example of nature’s architecturalization as symbol. The natural vault of trees that arches over the nude circle does not simply describe foliage; it stages an iconographic transfer from church nave to grove. The canopy becomes a kind of vegetal clerestory, converting the scene into a “natural cathedral” where bathing appears as a timeless rite. Within this structure, the circle/frieze of bathers operates like a ring of columns or piers, bodies functioning as load-bearing elements that echo the trunks’ verticality. Here, arboreal form and human anatomy conspire to construct a single, enduring order. Semiologically, the trees no longer signify untamed nature but a sacralized, regulating framework—a reminder that, in Cézanne’s hands, the grove is an apparatus for thinking about permanence, not a transient backdrop of leaves.

The water in Cézanne’s composition is correspondingly abstracted. It takes the form of a flowing water/stream that barely separates itself from the land, articulated through interlocking blues and ochres. Traditional iconography would read the stream as a locus of purification and renewal; Cézanne partially retains that charge, yet his constructive brushwork recasts the motif as a structural band that sutures the foreground group to the distant sky. The stream, in other words, becomes a horizontal counterweight to the vertical trees and bodies, an element of pictorial engineering that signals continuity and passage more than literal liquidity. Here, nature’s symbols double as metaphors for painting itself: trunks as columns, water as linking course, foliage as vault.

Monet, by contrast, radicalizes the volatility of natural motifs, turning river, haze, and cultivated ground into signs of time and perception. In The Artist’s Garden at Giverny, the profuse lush garden foliage and bands of meadow wildflowers are not merely emblems of fecundity; they function as optical fields. The irises’ violet bands advance like chromatic waves, while the slender lilac tree trunks offer a rhythm of verticals that guide and pace the viewer’s gaze. Nature’s abundance becomes a carefully calibrated device: the trunks stabilize the composition, yet their cool lilac tonality modulates the surrounding greens and magentas, making structure inseparable from sensation. The garden’s enclosure approaches the dense enclosing greenery of the hortus conclusus, but without medieval inwardness; instead it frames an experiment in dappled, flickering light, where transience is the principal subject. Iconographically, the planted beds and path recall cultivated paradise; semiotically, they index the temporality of seeing, each broken stroke a micro-sign of passing time.

That same logic of flux governs Monet’s serial seascapes. In San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, the lagoon and sky merge into a single chromatic continuum of shimmering water and reflections. The campanile vertical and its wavering vertical reflection articulate a dialectic of permanence and dissolution: the tower proposes architectural continuity, while its tremulous double in the basin signals the “fragility of the fixed within flux.” Nature—water and atmosphere—becomes an agent that tests and qualifies human order. Crucially, the silhouette of San Giorgio Maggiore is compressed into a dark, almost abstract profile, so that the surrounding silvery enveloppe of haze claims conceptual primacy. Nature here is not a picturesque stage for Venice but the medium in which history’s monuments are re-perceived, their authority recast as contingent on light and air.

Monet’s London canvas Houses of Parliament pursues a similar inversion. The seat of government is rendered as a nearly weightless silhouette embedded in a luminous fog/smog that tints sky and Thames alike. The water reflections below reduce the institution to pulses of mauve and apricot on the river’s surface, so that nature—and specifically polluted atmosphere—mediates and partially erases built power. These works take traditional landscape tropes—river, mist, sunset sky—and turn them into symbols of environmental and perceptual contingency: the motif is less Westminster than the historical air enveloping it.

Where Monet and Cézanne internalize architecture into landscape, Manet and Pissarro insist on nature’s encroachment into the modern city and its circuits of leisure. In Manet’s On the Beach, the banded, high-horizon sea compresses depth into stacked planes, transforming maritime vastness into a set of tonal bands. This sea is both an emblem of vastness and time and a decidedly modern screen against which fashionably dressed figures are silhouetted. The sailboats on the horizon function as punctuations of mobility and commerce, tiny signs of an expanded, transitory world. Yet the sea’s flattening and the radical cropping—forms indebted to japonisme—signal a new semiotic regime in which nature is translated into planar fields, echoing the urban grammar of posters and screens. The shore is no longer a Romantic threshold to the sublime so much as a liminal zone where bourgeois leisure meets abstracted natural force.

Pissarro’s Red Roofs complicates any simple nature–culture dichotomy by knitting village and terrain into a single, vibratory mesh. The screen of winter trees that mediates our view of the stone houses functions as “nature’s lattice or grid,” an organic analogue to the man-made alignment of gables and chimneys. Leafless, these trunks partake of the symbolism of leafless winter trees—seasonal bareness and structural clarity—yet semiotically they behave like a veil that both reveals and abstracts. They flatten depth into a near-planar fabric in which architecture’s stone gabled houses read as one more rhythm within nature’s pattern. The cool, moist, overcast sky further “equalizes forms,” binding settlement and hillside within a shared atmospheric envelope. Nature here does not oppose human habitation; it is the syntax through which settlement becomes legible as part of a larger, enduring order.

Renoir’s Girl with a Watering Can introduces nature at the scale of the bourgeois garden, where symbolism turns on nurture and temporality. The enveloping dappled foliage and light signify “outdoor freedom and Impressionist luminosity,” but they also mark a carefully bounded realm of ornamental flowerbeds and meadow wildflowers. These cultivated forms of nature project innocence—reinforced by the daisies the child holds—yet the scene’s atmospheric shimmer underscores the fragility of that state. The greenery’s slight blur and chromatic vibration project time’s passage around a crisply rendered child, suggesting that growth (implied by the watering can and blooms) is inseparable from change and eventual loss. Unlike the grand, architecturalized nature of Cézanne’s grove or Monet’s lagoon, Renoir’s garden is intimate, but its symbols likewise negotiate between stability (child, domestic care) and the transience inscribed in light and season.

Across these works, certain recurrent oppositions emerge: vertical against horizontal, enclosure against openness, solidity against shimmer. Trees—whether Cézanne’s arching canopy, Pissarro’s winter lattice, or Monet’s slender trunks—nearly always play the role of structuring verticals, emblems of order and continuity. Water, by contrast, is the privileged sign of flux and perception: the Seine in La Grenouillère, diffusing boats and bathers into shimmering water reflections; the Thames in Houses of Parliament, converting masonry into color patches; the Venetian basin in San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, dissolving stone into trembling refractions. Atmosphere—mist, smog, twilight gradients—mediates between these, at once revealing and veiling, turning nature into a filter for social and political meaning.

Historically, these symbols mark a shift from stable allegorical codes to open, process-oriented signification. Earlier traditions would have read the grove as locus amoenus, the river as moral journey, the sunset as vanitas. In the paintings discussed here, such echoes persist but are subsumed within a new emphasis on optical temporality and modern experience. The arcadian grove in Cézanne hardens into a geometric armature; the vast, mottled sky and expansive sky with low horizon of Monet’s seascapes become stages for recording atmospheric change; the silvery water and pale horizon of his Venetian and London views point less to eternal transcendence than to an open, indeterminate future. Nature’s symbols thus evolve from fixed emblems into dynamic operators of meaning, articulating a world in which perception, environment, and history are understood as inextricably entwined.