While doing his all-gray paintings, he also copied portraits of noted artists and statesmen from encyclopedias, produced color charts resembling the ones distributed to customers in paint stores and composed landscapes that were nearly indistinguishable from slightly out-of-focus photographs.

Its chief proponent in this country was the architect Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-92), known by the 1830's for his Picturesque houses, whose variety and asymmetry were designed to complement pleasantly composed landscapes.

His sketches in Italy were more than transcripts of the spots; he studied nature with the purpose of composing historic and poetic landscapes.

Works ascribed to a youthful period in the 1520s have tautly composed landscapes inhabited by a few large-scale figures.

Fearnley's paintings alternate between oil sketches and larger, composed landscapes meant for exhibition.

His students, mostly women, turned out perfectly composed still lifes, soft-focus Impressionist landscapes, overwrought Symbolist scenes, and Japanese-influenced pictures of children hovering over lily-filled pools.

Atget composed other landscapes with grave simplicity, a reduction to essentials that is actually quite bold but in these tranquil meditations wears an unassuming air.

With the help of the cinematographer Roger Deakins, who composes beige and ocher landscapes that look simultaneously lush and austere, the brothers have made the American South into a gauzy dreamland.

A few photographers even tried to make art with it, staging mostly hokey tableaux vivants and composing landscapes.