A Timeline for Landscape in the Arts

I have put together a new timeline of landscape and the arts based on entries in this blog.  It covers five hundred people, ranging in time from Sargon II, King of Assyria, to Robert Macfarlane.  It replaces the earlier chronology I did.  This long list was starting to feel a bit burdensome to keep up (I've also decided to drop my index for the same reason, and because in practical terms the search function here works pretty well).  The software for the timeline is free and uses Google Docs - I think it is pretty cool.  It was not really designed to have as many entries as I have so you will need to use the zoom buttons to navigate clearly through the more recent years.  I have shown an example of this below for a point in the twentieth centur.  If you want to go straight to a version that is on maximum zoom and pointed at the current year, click here.  But from any point you can drag the timeline forwards and backwards.  It is also easy just to move along one entry at a time.

As this timeline relates to people rather than events, there is only one entry per person.  So Emily Carr is recorded in 1942 (late in her career), the year she published 'The Book of Small', rather than, say, 1928 when she painted Kitwancool.  William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith and Lord Byron all get one entry only.  I could have included a lot more than 500, based just on the blog as it now stands.  However, I have omitted artists only mentioned in passing, lesser artists and more peripheral figures or well known names that have not really been prominent in exploring landscape (I decided not to include Picasso).  The timeline also concentrates on creative figures rather than critics, theorists, geographers and historians. I intend to amend it occasionally and add to it gradually, especially for earlier years; you can see now why I was interested in writing last week about a datable art work from 1072.  But the blog won't be skewed towards filling in gaps in the timeline.  Some Landscapes is not intended to be a historical encyclopedia of landscape and the arts and doesn't aim at being comprehensive (hence the word 'some').  It will continue to evolve through a process of serendipity, featuring whatever I have come across that seems interesting and worth sharing.