Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction - by Stephanie O'Rourke (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists grappled with an enormous transformation of how human beings relate to the natural world. The management and extraction of resources on an unprecedented scale and within a global network required novel systems for measuring, analyzing, and manipulating natural phenomena across vast distances. Reading paintings and prints through the lens of concepts from environmental history, including unbundling, longtermism, and scale-thinking, this book examines the relationship between the operations of landscape and the operations of extraction. "Picturing landscape" is not a genre but rather a mode of inquiry through which artists explored the promises and the perils of extractive processes and the scientific concepts that informed them. Stephanie O'Rourke reveals this operation at work in relation to specific industries, such as mining and timber harvesting, as well as concepts of race, climate, and waste emerging within the continent and its colonial networks. In so doing, she offers fresh consideration of what was at stake in visual representations at a crucial moment when the natural world was increasingly defined by its incommensurability with human experience"--

Book Synopsis

O'Rourke argues that artistic representations played a pivotal role in shaping how people thought about the natural world during the Industrial Revolution.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists confronted the emergence of a new way of thinking about and treating the Earth and its resources. Centered on extraction, this new paradigm was characterized by large-scale efforts to transform and monetize the physical environment across the globe. With this book, Stephanie O'Rourke considers such practices, looking at what was at stake in visual representations of the natural world during the first decades of Europe's industrial revolutions.

O'Rourke argues that key developments in the European landscape painting tradition were profoundly shaped by industries including mining and timber harvesting, as well as by interlinked ideas about race, climate, and waste. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, Germany, and across Europe's colonial networks, she explores how artworks and technical illustrations portrayed landscapes in ways that promoted--or pushed against--the logic of resource extraction.

Review Quotes

"Driven by deft visual analyses, O'Rourke's narrative provides an immersive tour of forests, mountains, mines, and peoples imagined anew as 'resources.' If you want to know how recent debates have figured relations between European science and technology, visual art, global populations, and projects of colonial exploitation in the making of the modern world-picture, read this book."--Matthew C. Hunter, author of "Painting with Fire"

"How do we write the history of nineteenth-century European art in our era of climate catastrophe? In Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction, O'Rourke does it with patience, precision, and courage, deftly moving from Paris to the mines of Saxony, from Algerian forests and flooded French parks to London sewers and colonial fever dreams. In the process, she states that we cannot separate the rise of plein air painting from the period's exploitation of mineral deposits, plant and animal life, and human labor. Her flexible category of 'picturing landscape' crosses and draws together traditional landscape, scientific illustration, and situated portraiture to retell the history of the Industrial Revolution from a resolutely visual perspective: one we must regain if art is to face the challenges capitalist modernity has posed to life on earth."--Andrei Pop, author of "A Forest of Symbols"

"O'Rourke offers a striking and highly original interpretation of the relationship between art and extraction, showing how the visual conventions of landscape were reimagined in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art in response to the rise of extractive capitalism. Wide-ranging and rigorous, the book offers a radically new history of landscape, reframing conventional understandings of industrialization, natural history, and the human relationship to nature. This is a major contribution to art history."--Siobhan Angus, author of "Camera Geologica"

About the Author

Stephanie O'Rourke is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism.