Summer Camp with William J. Stillman: Looking at Nature, between Ruskin and Emerson

Georgi, Karen L.

doi:10.1086/701614

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, for every painting that shouts a larger‐than‐life point about the wholesale transformation of the forest, there are just as many (or more) visual representations that present direct field observations in more nuanced environments. Painting and sketching on site formed a critical part of the identity and philosophy of mid‐19th century artists in the Hudson River School (Georgi, 2018; Harvey, 1998; Strazdes, 2009). Arts leaders like Durand, who wrote his famous Letters on Landscape Painting (1855) on this topic, were adamant that paintings should originate in the close observation of nature and of forests, landscapes, and waterways as they were seen and studied on site (Durand, 1855).…”

Section: Reframing the Question Of Accuracy In 19th Century Landscape...mentioning

confidence: 99%

An interdisciplinary framework for evaluating 19th century landscape paintings for ecological research

Warren,

Loeb,

Betjemann

et al. 2023

Ecosphere

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As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land‐use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full‐color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings' potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity. How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist's manipulation of a scene to best illustrate an allegory or romanticized view of nature? Following an established assessment model from historical ecology for evaluating resource validity, we demonstrate how scholarship on art history can be integrated with ecological understanding of forest landscapes to follow this model and address these questions of image veracity in 19th century American art. Further, to illustrate the potential use of these historic images in ecological studies, we present in a case study assessing microhabitat features of 10 different paintings. While this paper explores 19th century landscape art broadly, we focus our art historical review in particular on Asher Durand, a prolific and influential artist associated with the so‐called “Hudson River School” in the mid‐1800s. Durand left clear records about his perspectives on accurately depicting nature, and from a review of images and writings of Durand, we find support for the potential use of many of his paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research. However, we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images. More broadly, because 19th century landscape paintings are not always directly transcriptive, and because regional art cultures differed in the 1800s, we cannot within this paper speak about landscape image veracity across all 19th century landscape art. However, in following established methods in historical ecology and integrating tools from art history research, we show that one can identify accurate historic landscape paintings for application in scientific studies.

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Section: Reframing the Question Of Accuracy In 19th Century Landscape...mentioning

confidence: 99%

An interdisciplinary framework for evaluating 19th century landscape paintings for ecological research

Warren,

Loeb,

Betjemann

et al. 2023

Ecosphere

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Summer Camp with William J. Stillman: Looking at Nature, between Ruskin and Emerson

Cited by 1 publication

References 15 publications

An interdisciplinary framework for evaluating 19th century landscape paintings for ecological research

An interdisciplinary framework for evaluating 19th century landscape paintings for ecological research

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