Landscape has been an integral part of painting since we crawled out of the primordial muck and began scratching out images of trees on the walls of caves. Since then landscape painting has been through many different incarnations. However if you're interested in the roots of the modern landscape, look no further than a particularly influential group of French Impressionistic painters on show at the National Art Gallery.

Claude Monet Grainstack (Sunset), 1891

Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape "begins with the origins of the Impressionist landscape in the 1850s and 1860s, including early work by Claude Monet in the spirit of the Realist landscape style. It then explores the development of the genre in the 1870s to 1890s, represented by an outstanding group of paintings by Boudin, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and Cézanne." The exhibition offers you the chance to survey the French landscape over an extensive period of time. The works shown stretch from the 1850s to the end of the 19th century. Paintings by Post-Impressionist artists like Gauguin and van Gogh are also on display. Talk about a Plato to Nato of landscape. One word of warning. The exhibition is leaving town on Sunday, so get there while you can. And if you can't get to Ottawa, there are two good online, interactive tours of the exhibit, one in Shockwave and the other customized for old-fashioned web browsing.

Here's just a hint of some of the wonders you can feast your eyes upon: