Join us for a HESCAH lecture by Dr. Stephanie O’Rourke, Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of St. Andrew, Scotland.
"The Colonial Forest and the French Landscape"
This talk explores how the French landscape tradition was shaped by a new science of forest management in territorial France and colonial Algeria. Artworks and technical diagrams alike gave pictorial form to technocratic procedures for exploiting various kind of “value” in forests, both in the metropole and in its colonial territories—even, I suggest, artworks we assume to be “ecological” in their orientation. Among other things, we can consider the extent to which trees were understood to be a fundamental instrument that French administrators wielded to control the climate of both territorial France and its colonies.
Dr. Stephanie O’Rourke is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, with a focus on landscape, scientific knowledge, and colonial extractive practices. She is the author of Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which won the British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize, and Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2025). Her research has appeared in leading journals such as Art History, Representations, and Journal18, and she has contributed to major exhibitions at institutions like MoMA and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Image credit: Achille-Etna Michallon, Beech Tree (Étude de hêtre), by 1817. Oil on canvas, 36.2cm x 28.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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