Summer, when we spend more time outdoors, seems especially suited to shows of landscape painting, which is why Elliott Fouts Gallery is hosting its sixth annual look at our natural environs. "Where We Live" is the title of the show, which features artists from all parts of the state but especially the Central Valley.

Elements of landscape painting date back to Egypt, Greece and Rome, where pastoral scenes decorated the walls of Pompeiian villas. But until the 16th century in Northern Europe, landscape in Western art played a subordinate role in paintings with historical or religious themes or in portraits like Leonardo's "Mona Lisa." 

Albrecht Altdorfer (1435-1538) is mentioned in the Oxford Companion to Art as the first European artist to produce pure landscapes, ones that didn't illustrate stories with figures as players in the scene. But a number of Flemish and Dutch artists in the 16th century turned their attention to the pure landscape in part because of the Reformation. With the change in religious attitudes fostered by the Protestant revolution, church commissions for paintings with biblical themes dried up and artists turned to new ways of making a living, portraying the world around them.

Landscapes, noted the art adviser to England's King Charles I, were of all pictures "the most innocent, and … could never be accused of idolatry." Because of this puritan streak in the north of Europe, landscape painting flourished among the Dutch with artists like Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema. It also reached a high level of acclaim further south with the French painter Claude Lorraine, and eventually in England with John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Many would assert that landscape reached its highest peak with Claude Monet and the impressionists in 19th century France.

At the time of the Industrial Revolution, landscape, particularly of the picturesque sort, became all the dearer as the natural world was increasingly encroached upon by man. But in the 20th century, landscape was largely relegated to the realm of the "Sunday painter," amateurs who often went outdoors to paint the landscape around them. There were exceptions – Edward Hopper comes to mind – but the mainstream of art tended away from depictions of scenic views.

Today, however, there has been a growing interest in landscape painting, particularly of the plein-air school, but really of all persuasions as is evidenced by the show that opened Friday at Elliott Fouts. There has been in the last 20 years a dramatic increase in paintings of the local landscape, enough that some have posited a "Sacramento School" of landscape painting, but the reality is that there are landscape painters active all over California and in most other parts of the United States as well. Perhaps in this electronic and digital era, the land seems more precious than ever as a subject and a touchstone for our common roots in the earth.

The landscapes on view at Fouts Gallery range from scenes of the farmlands of the Central Valley to the wetlands of Humboldt County to the north and  Monterey to the south. The most conventional works in the show are Manual Nunes' views of a Delta pond and the Monterey Coast. They might easily hang among the 19th century California landscapes at the Crocker and feel right at home. Philippe Gandiol, who focuses on the territory around Davis and Woodland, has a slightly more contemporary feeling, giving us plein-air scenes of a small airport, a factory and an old pickup truck parked in front of a country home.

Kathy O'Leary offers three works notable for the subtlety of their color and atmospheric effects. Her subjects include a Humboldt Bay island, a marshy scene of the same area and a verdant view of the Eel River. They are among the strongest works in the show.

Susan Hoehn gives us a series of paintings of vineyards in a kind of florid impressionist style in which autumn grape vines almost seem to be on fire and curving vines on a hill take on an almost three-dimensional quality. The 3-D effect of her paintings is amplified by her penchant for extending the paintings around the edges of the canvas so that the works do not need to be framed.

Vito Antonio Ferrante moves toward abstraction in his scene of cliffs at Yosemite, but his painting suffers from being too much like similar scenes by Gregory Kondos and Wayne Thiebaud. John Karl Claes strikes a more original note with his intensely colored paintings of farmlands, especially "Western Skies" with its bank of yellow clouds against a teal sky and viridian valley.

The show moves more decidedly into the contemporary landscape with Bryan Mark Taylor's impressionist influenced scenes of Sacramento streets, including a small canvas of J Street with the Elks Temple in the middle distance.

All in all, the show makes a pleasant retreat from the heat and gives us a chance to ponder what is left of the nature around us and our continuing need for it.