Landscape with Boats

Medium: Lithograph and screen-print in colors on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper
Year: 1996
Image: 27 3/4 x 58 inches (70.5 x 147.3 cm)
Sheet: 35 1/4 x 65 inches (89.5 x 165.1 cm)
Edition: 60
Artist’s Proofs: 12 AP
Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles
Literature: Corlett 302, Gemini 1672

Signed, dated and numbered in pencil with the publisher’s blindstamp

Landscape with Boats is a print derived from the eponymous painting that sold at Christie’s on 14 May 2019 for USD 6,267,500.

Painted in 1996, Landscape with Boats belongs to an elite grouping from Roy Lichtenstein’s most innovative and insightful years. At once monumental and serene, this sublime painting belongs to the artist’s Landscape in the Chinese Style series—and one of a handful of horizontal “scrolls”—which look to the Chinese master painters from the Song dynasty (960–1279) for stylistic inspiration. Lichtenstein, however, was in reality prompted by Edgar Degas’s 1994 retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The works in this exhibition seemed to suggest to Lichtenstein that the features of a landscape could be achieved with limited, albeit strategic and exacting, swaths of paint. To create this painting, Lichtenstein used his signature Ben-Day dots in methodical concentrations to produce the traces of water, horizon, mountains, sky and depth. Furthermore, Lichtenstein decorated the perimeter of the composition with calligraphic tree branches and leaves to give the viewer the sense they are looking onto an expansive seascape from a high hillside. He added strokes of blue, green and yellow to hint at foliage on the tops of each mountain peak, and also used more exacting geometric shapes to place one boat with two figures in yellow and red in the foreground. Then he painted hazy suggestions of boats in the distance to suggest depth, effectively completing the painting.

Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2019
USD 7,000,000 – 9,000,000
USD 6,267,500

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)
Landscape with Boats, 1996
Oil and Magna on canvas
62 x 170 1/4 inches (157.5 x 432.4 cm)

Bold and reverent, Landscape with Boat is distinctly Lichtensteinian. Whereas his artworks from the 1960s duplicated found-comic book imagery to synthesize fine art and Pop culture, Landscape with Boats exemplifies Lichtenstein’s maturity and essential singularity. The key formal components of the artist’s oeuvre—Ben-Day dots and bold colors—are clearly present, yet the harsh black strokes that typically delineate borders are now absent. Instead, Lichtenstein has opted to rely solely on his dots to construct the contours of Landscape with Boats. The artist deconstructs the usual signifiers of his subject—sea, sky and mountains—and reconstructs them by playing with the negative space of the canvas. At a glance, Lichtenstein’s Ben-Days establish depth by utilizing the horizontal plane of this canvas. The more concentrated the dots, the closer the plane—as illustrated by the top and bottom of the canvas. The dots then seem to dissipate towards the middle x-axis to suggest a misty horizon in the distance. However, the mountains tend to obfuscate the perspectives established by the borders. Black dots are concentrated at the tips of each mountain, making it impossible to guess which is closer or farther from the viewer. The true anchoring devices in Landscape with Boats are the gangly tree branches to the left and bottom right-hand corner, as well as the scattered boats towards the misty limits of the water. These instruments, perhaps deliberately, break from Lichtenstein’s conventional methods to teleologically ground the otherwise spatially-liberated composition.

The works from the Landscapes in the Chinese Style, and the present work in particular, borrow this dimensional ambiguity from the Song dynasty masters such as Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, Liang, Kai and Muqi. Their elegant technique demonstrated a harmonious and vast universe suffused with Daoist philosophies which emphasized balance, simplicity, harmony, humility and mindfulness. Xia’s Pure and Remote Mountains and Streams (National Taipei Museum, Taiwan) illustrates such refined candor in the calligraphic execution of the towering mountains and cliffs. This work especially echoes Lichtenstein’s infatuation with Chinese painting.

“The thing that interested me was the mountains in front of mountains in front of mountains, and huge nature with little people. We all have a vague idea of what Chinese landscape look like—that sense of grandeur the Chinese felt about nature.” 

Despite Lichtenstein’s adamant claims of generating a “mechanical” iteration of the Song scrolls, Landscape with Boats offers a version so harmonious and in keeping with Chinese landscape painting. Simultaneously entrenched in Eastern tradition and contemporary Western ideologies, the works in this series are among Lichtenstein’s most sophisticated. They encompass simultaneous opposing forces—old and new, calligraphic and mechanical, East and West. The result is a universally relatable masterpiece by one of Pop’s masters. Perhaps related to Lichtenstein’s decision to engage with Chinese landscape during the 1990s is that China’s own economic and cultural reality was shifting towards a consumer culture due to political reasons.

Auction Results

Sotheby’s New-York: 15 April 2025
Estimated: USD 70,000 – 100,000
USD 139,700
AUCTION RECORD FOR LANDSCAPE WITH BOATS

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997)
Landscape with Boats (Corlett 302), 1996
Lithograph and screenprint in colors on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper
Signed in pencil, dated and numbered 50/60

Bonhams Skinner: 14 January 2025
Estimated: USD 70,000 – 90,000
USD 95,750

Grisebach: 3 June 2022
Estimated: EUR 40,000 – 60,000
EUR 87,500 / USD 97,125

ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Landscape with Boats, 1996
Color lithograph and silkscreen on wove paper
Signed, dated and numbered in pencil

Phillips New-York: 25 April 2016
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 75,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Landscape with Boats, 1996
Lithograph and screen-print in colors on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper
Signed, dated ’96’ and numbered 17/60 in pencil

Sotheby’s New-York: 2 November 2007
Estimated: USD 40,000 – 50,000
USD 91,000

ROY LICHTENSTEIN
Landscape with Boats (C. 302), 1996
Lithograph and screen-print in colors
signed in pencil, dated and numbered 9/60