Since the first, ground-breaking exhibition and catalogue essays of ‘New Worlds From Old: 19th-Century Australian & American Landscapes’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in which the paintings of both countries were critically compared for the first time in 1998, landscape studies have become considerably more informed by the histories of First Peoples, science, economics, politics and migratory patterns.
In taking account of and uniting these developments, this anthology project Colonization and Wilderness in Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Paintings, co-edited with Professor Kenneth Haltman (The University of Oklahoma), accepted for publication by The University of Chicago Press, 2020, places its primary emphasis on the landscape paintings of these countries as evidence of the Anthropocene: our contemporary realisation that human history and environmental science are joined at the hip through climate change.
The core focus of the anthology, however, will be on the changing emotional tenor of the vexed relationship between environmental change and aesthetic innovation as colonial settlement supplanted wilderness across both countries and many other parts of the world. Richard Read and Kenneth Haltman will contribute an introduction, and Read will contribute a chapter on ‘Perception, History and Ecology: The Heritage of Molyneux’s Question in New World Landscape Painting’. In keeping with other chapters in the volume, this chapter will have strong eighteenth-century relevance, notably in regard to the heritage of British and German theories of perception (Locke, Berkeley, Kant) in nineteenth-century landscape painting and aesthetic writing.
The anthology of essays arises from papers delivered at a two-day symposium with leading scholars from America, Australia and Britain on ‘Colonization and Wilderness in Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting’. The symposium was focused on thirty American and Australian nineteenth-century landscape paintings shown together from the collections of the Terra Foundation in Chicago and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in the exhibition ‘Continental Shift’ from July 2016 to February 2017. The event arose from the first ever teaching/exhibition project funded by the Terra Foundation of American Art (TFAA) in collaboration with the UWA School of Design, and The Art Gallery of Western Australia where the symposium and exhibition were held. Four of the contributors (Brownlee, DeLue, Haltman and Read) also participated in the sixty hours of teaching on two university courses held before paintings in the exhibition. A related exhibition with different Australian paintings took place under the new title ‘Parallel Histories: 19th-Century Australian and American Landscape Painting’ at the Ian Potter Museum of Art (The University of Melbourne), 6–9 April 2017, and was the subject of a second international symposium, ‘Not as the Songs of Other Lands: 19th-Century Australian and American Landscape Painting’ at The University of Melbourne on 7 April 2017, from which papers were drawn for the anthology. Grant applications have been submitted to the Yale Centre for British Art, The Terra Foundation for American Art and Tyson Scholarships, Crystal Bridge, Arkansas for a follow-up single-authored book on The Aftermath of Molyneux Question in British and American Landscape Painting and Aesthetic Writing.
The emotional and ecological aspects of this project will be explored in a lecture on ‘Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting’ at a seminar on ‘EcoPeoPle Symposium: Thinking Environment, Feeling Nature’, convened by Associate Professor Andrea Gaynor at UWA on 15 February 2018.
Image: Alfred Thompson Bricher, The Sidewheeler "The City of St. Paul" on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa, 1872. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 20 1/8 x 38 1/8 in. (51.1 x 96.8 cm), Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.18