Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction

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 Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction, 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.