The treasures of the Princely Collections were shown in 1948 for the first time outside Vienna – and never again – in a spectacular exhibition entitled Masterpieces from the Collections of the Prince of Liechten­stein in the Museum of Art Lucerne. Many of the landscapes are now on show again as part of the presentation on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of this remarkable event.

Landscapes form a central core of the princely picture gallery, covering the entire span of the collection from the late 14th to the mid-19th century. If the landscape at first appears not as the actual theme of the work, but only a view, a background staffage, it subsequently acquires increasing weight as a genre in its own right, and enjoys its first golden age in the 17th century, most of all among the Flemish and Dutch painters. These same artists have been represented by incomparable major works in the Princely Collections – the introduction to the 1948 Lucerne catalogue observes that ‘the eyes of the princely collectors have always been aimed at Belgium and Holland’ – both in the past and in the present day.

The exhibition covers the entire spectrum of landscape painting, through to recently acquired examples of urban landscapes, shown here for the first time. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Arcadian landscapes were produced, ideal landscapes that were supposed to lead the visitor away to an imagined ancient world that had never existed in that form; a generation later, painters such as Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller sought the light of the south and during the time of Biedermeier discovered plein-air painting, which would lead without a break to Impressionism. This period in particular could not be better covered than by the material of the Princely Collections; all the great names of the day are represented here by significant major works.

About 50 paintings in very different formats show a cross-section of the fascinating field of landscape painting over five centuries, from its modest beginnings as a small view in the background to a monumental panorama which the viewer is invited to enter.