The super natural

Just before cameras transformed the Italian countryside into a 3-D postcard, painters from the rest of Europe worked to capture the magic of the landscape. Without the benefits of photography, they made images the old-fashioned way: traipsing across the rugged terrain, setting up easels in out-of-the-way places and getting down to work in oils on canvas. In the open air, wind, insects and the constantly changing daylight made painting an adventure.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, “Sur le motif: Painting in Nature Around 1800” takes viewers back to a time before TV, movies and photographs, when looking at hand-painted pictures of faraway places was nearly as thrilling as traveling there -- and a lot easier.

Installed straightforwardly in a single gallery, the unpresumptuous exhibition’s 29 paintings, three sketchbooks and a how-to manual highlight the freedom 16 painters found in a seemingly simple format: realistic pictures of trees, streams and valleys, some featuring ancient ruins, rustic towns and people passing by and others so far off the beaten track that the landscapes seem to be one step from Eden: lush, unspoiled, at peace.

Five paintings by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot introduce visitors to a range of styles and an equally wide range of ideas about the world we live in. The most idealized, “Italian Landscape” (1835), features dancing peasants, bathing cattle, a lakeside city and ancient ruins, all illuminated by golden sunlight and woven together in a balanced composition that recalls illusionistic stage sets and campy play-acting.

“A View From the Outskirts of Rome Toward Monte Carlo” (1826) is a compact panorama of an expansive landscape, its tidy horizon interrupted by blocky buildings. Corot’s simplified, cube-shaped buildings and palette of golden yellows, greens and browns anticipate Cezanne’s paintings, themselves precursors to Cubism.

“Houses Near Orleans” (1830) is even more modern; its point-blank depiction of the unglamorous backsides of stone houses, in dazzling, late-afternoon sunlight, is as vivid and unsentimental a picture as any politically laced Realism.

“Villeneuve-les-Avignon” (1836) looks flat-out contemporary. Its stark contrasts between shadows and glaring light make you squint to focus on the tiny town in the distance. In the foreground, Corot has painted the branches of trees and the stems of plants so that they are blurry, as if quivering in the wind or out of focus. The juicy tactility of paint and the cool detachment of photographs come together in the stunningly cinematic painting.

Other standouts include Jean-Charles-Joseph Remond’s “Lake Nemi” (1830), in which a fallen tree’s crumbling bark and splintered wood offer a world of detail. Similarly, Jean-Victor Bertin’s “Study of a Tree” (1800-05) is as vivacious a portrait as any that depicts a human sitter. And an oddly poignant picture of a path through a city park by Norwegian painter Thomas Fearnley suggests that nature is not at its best when it’s domesticated.

The raw power of the natural world screams out from “The Falls at Tivoli” (1826) by Louise-Josephine Sarazin de Belmont, which casts classical architecture as a precarious and ultimately futile toehold in a turbulent world where terra firma is an illusion.

In “A View of the Sea at Ischia Under a Stormy Sky” and “Study of Clouds With a Sunset Near Rome” (both 1786-1801), Simon-Alexandre-Clement Denis turns his eye to the sky. Long before California’s Light and Space movement got started in the 1960s, the Flemish painter made art out of thin air, rendering the drama of light passing through the atmosphere with passionate aplomb.

Jean-Michel Cels’ “Stormy Sky Over a Landscape With a Distant Church” (1838) lacks the creamy brushwork and meaty punch of Denis’ works, but his “Landscape Study of a Sandy Embankment With Plants” (1840) is a knockout.

All of the modestly scaled works in “Sur le motif” were made between 1785 and 1845. The next group of painters to go out into the landscape and paint from nature were the Impressionists, whose art followed hot on the heels of photography and changed the way we see -- and live in -- our surroundings.

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‘Sur le motif: Painting in Nature Around 1800’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturdays

Price: Free, but $10 for parking

Contact: (310) 440-7300