Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction

Why It Matters

The study reveals that European art actively shaped and obscured early capitalist extraction, providing essential historical context for today’s environmental and colonial accountability debates.

Key Takeaways

• Landscape painting acted as laboratory for early extraction narratives
• Extraction defined as coordinated quantification, optimization, and monetization of nature
• French state-regulated versus German private extraction models contrast sharply
• Visuals isolate natural elements, enabling conversion into economic raw materials
• Colonial forest management reshaped European landscape aesthetics

Summary

The evening celebrated Stephanie O. Rock’s new monograph, *Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction* (University of Chicago Press), which situates European art history within the environmental and colonial economies of 1780‑1850. Rock argues that late‑eighteenth‑ and early‑nineteenth‑century landscape painting was not merely aesthetic but functioned as a visual laboratory where artists negotiated emerging geological time, emerging notions of deep time, and the burgeoning logic of extraction.

The book reframes extraction as a specific historical regime: large‑scale, coordinated efforts to quantify, optimize, separate, circulate, and monetize natural resources across Europe’s colonial networks. Drawing on literary scholars such as Adelene Buckland, Rock shows how the rhetoric of “raw material” erased cultural and ecological value, presenting nature as a neutral commodity. She maps divergent national practices—state‑controlled French forest management and German ore mining versus Britain’s privately regulated industries—illustrating how visual strategies mirrored these economic structures.

Concrete examples populate the analysis: French academic landscapes that render forests as unbundled, quantifiable units; Barbizon painters whose “ecological turn” still reflected colonial timber policies in Algeria; and German mining vistas that disrupt the horizontal logic of traditional landscape by foregrounding subterranean shafts. These images both reveal and conceal extraction, creating a “subvisibility” that invites new scholarly scrutiny.

By exposing how art helped construct and legitimize early extractive modernity, Rock’s work urges art historians to adopt interdisciplinary tools from environmental history and colonial studies. The book also offers a template for examining how contemporary visual culture may continue to mask the ecological costs of resource exploitation, making the past a critical lens for present‑day policy and sustainability debates.

Original Description

This event celebrates the publication of Stephanie O’Rourke’s major new book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and its Colonial Networks, 1780-1850 (Chicago UP, 2025). O’Rourke’s timely book explores the deep links between landscape representation and resource extraction during the first decades of Europe’s industrial revolutions. Landscape painting was both profoundly shaped by extractive industries, such as mining and forestry, and can reveal attitudes towards an emergent logic of extractivism that continues to shape our world. The book makes an essential contribution to debates about landscape, environment, technology and industry.

This panel discussion, featuring O’Rourke in conversation with distinguished Professors John Tresch and Susan Siegfried, will illuminate the book’s key themes.

Organised by Esther Chadwick, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, Courtauld Institute.

https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/picturing-landscape-in-an-age-of-extraction/