The retrospective of John Prentiss Benson (1865-1947) at the Randall Gallery at the Portsmouth Athenaeum through Oct. 7 provides a ready historical reference for two group shows, "32 Degrees: Reflections of Winter" at the George Marshall Store in York through Sept. 12 and "The Landscape Show" at Nahcotta in Portsmouth through Sept. 28.

Landscape painting is no hard sell. Perhaps it's so popular because, like a room with a view, it easily inspires reverie. Window-like, it's the only genre that concretely assumes the shape of any painting's vision-expanding mission. Yet, like the music world's ignoble viola and oafish banjo, landscape painting long suffered a lowly status in the western art-world. The tool of cartographers or surveyors, outdoor sketching initially served the backdrop needs of indoor painting. For most of human history, the under-privileged sought to survive and overcome the landscape; eventually the privileged, once tourism was invented, wanted replicas of it, like vistas of Rome whilst on the Grand Tour. But serious art dealt with sacred or secular history.

Then came the camera. Photography diminished the documentary function of history and portrait painting, and decreasing patronage and increasing leisure pushed artists in private directions, pursuing art for art's sake. The French Impressionists-romanced by optics, bored by academic stricture, enabled by trust funds-went outdoors. History painting's treatment of light was rhetorical, exaggerated as the narrative required, aimed at an ideal timelessness. But on-site painting turned the painter's immediate observation of the action of light (and hence of the passage of time) on ordinary place and activity into worthy subject matter.

American Impressionists like Benson gazed nostalgically across the Atlantic, emulating the empirical astuteness of the French model without its experimental dash. When feeling led Benson's virtuosity, as in "Alde River-Suffolk, England," "Reflections" and "Beached Boat," his paintings are as moving as they are exemplary.

Several works at George Marshall adhere to impressionism, particularly Grant Drumheller's warm, luminous panorama, "Small Frozen Landscape, Evening." Watercolorist Michael Walek responsively renders his "Tree Dance at Phillip's Cove," and Gail E. Sauter's "Winter Passing" shows trees reviving from melting snow with sensitive touch and color harmony. Amy Brngr's strong paintings (in both shows) freshly dispatch the actual and emotional effects of daylight on suburbia's random contents. Their happy domesticity seems convinced all is right in the world-which may be why the darks lack color. Her larger "Winter Still Life and Landscape" extends the comfort zone with a range in temperament and execution.

Others, like Tom Curry's striking "Winter Barrens," with its syncopated movement and eager shape and color, pay homage to American modernists such as Marsden Hartley. Arthur di Mambro's robust "Ice Out With Still Life" alludes also to Abstract Expressionism-that great American movement initiated by European immigrants-in its gutsy scale and brushwork. Tom Glover's realist "January Marsh" is a complex vista whose tricky foreground problem is proficiently resolved, although emotional veracity could better match its technical facility. Alex de Steigeur's photography captures the amazing in the actual, and (as Ansel Adams proved), shows how black and white renders nature's rhythms and textures clearly marvelous.

At Nahcotta, Michael Hindle's paintings reference Edwin Dickinson in their expert suggestivity. Hindle's distinctive ability to render realistically with no loss of poetry is hindered by conceptual posturing, however, and the paintings feel scant. One wishes this gifted painter would show off his strengths more. Conversely, Janice Arthur's photographic technique eclipses the meticulous intensity and alluringly weird light in her otherwise impressive "Maple and Birch"; the remove the camera creates should be meaningful, the way the fashionable work of Gerhard Richter conveys East German drab. Sigrid Sandstrom's small, contemporary arctic-scapes enclosed in ovals feel like dreamy views from a periscope, and Vera Iliatova's poignant "Fourth of July" uses minimalism effectively, as arid brushwork of a lone firework seen from a distance turns the viewer into a wallflower.

The meditative function of fine art makes it the gift that keeps on giving. Benson's paintings may be a bit stodgy, but his expertise is nothing to sniff at, especially nowadays, when homes across America are becoming infested with Thomas Kincaid's McArt: frighteningly cheesy landscapes that-like certain presidents who shall remain unnamed-feed off ignorance, and make Bob Ross seem like a purist. Objects purporting to be fine art should aspire toward excellence the way your average Olympian does, not the way a hurdling Paris Hilton or a Yanni from the Acropolis might entertain. If only Jerry MacMichael's humble but chic ice-fishing shack sculptures (at George Marshall), aesthetically accessible to the uneducated and sophisticated eye alike, were so popular. They possess a fun, homespun quality that might demote them to folksy status were they not so smartly designed and beautifully crafted; I want one.

If for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction, perhaps the more technology separates us from nature, the more extremely we seek it. At its best-in the awesome elemental responses of Monet and Corot, or in the visions of Van Gogh and Turner-landscape painting is sublime. At its most banal it's tourist art, a mere Kodak moment needlessly immortalized in enduring materials. None of the landscapes at these venues descend to that level; a few pose just above it, but there are many fine works that would beautify any abode.