Land into Landscape

An exploration of shifting landscapes—both real and represented—in nineteenth-century France and the role of images in both picturing and producing those shifts.

What is the relationship between land and landscape? This engaging study examines the role landscape depictions played in the formation of modern France and reveals how art and visual culture contributed to the physical and symbolic shaping of the nation. Spanning more than a century, from the post-revolutionary period through to the early twentieth century, Land into Landscape explores political and environmental shifts alongside changes in landscape representation across a variety of media, including paintings, photographs, prints, porcelain, and maps.

Through this broad and diverse set of images—by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Théodore Rousseau, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, as well as lesser-known figures—Kelly Presutti contends that representational problems were also political problems, which often required drastic solutions on the part of the state. In the nineteenth century, France's forests were replanted, its wetlands were drained, its coasts were secured, and its mountains restored. Landscapes and their inhabitants, however, could resist being co-opted as emblems of a greater ideal. The book therefore addresses the tension between a place and its representation—a matter of heightened urgency in a moment when we are once again struggling to both see and manage our environment.