Terroir after the terror : landscape and representation in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

In the decades following the French Revolution, landscape paintings appeared at exhibitions in greater numbers than ever before and with more critical approval; at the same time, France's actual landscapes were being reconfigured, in both physical and symbolic ways. This dissertation investigates the relationship between land reform and landscape representation following the French Revolution through to the early Third Republic (1790-circa 1880), combining object study with environmental history to draw out the political stakes of seemingly picturesque scenes. Looking beyond painting to include an analysis of decorative arts and visual culture, this study challenges established hierarchies of fine and decorative arts, canonical and non-canonical artists, and attention to Paris over the provinces. My first chapter considers the role of mountains, and their depiction, in defining France's "natural limits"; the second, state-supported representations of ports, from images of the nation's coastal strongholds painted by Joseph Vernet in the eighteenth century to engravings produced by his nineteenth-century successor, Louis Garneray, as a form of visual border control; the third, the impact of a stringent forestry code passed in 1827 on Barbizon artists' aesthetic and material choices; and finally, the state's decision, in 1857, to drain wetlands in the southwest and the resulting effort on the part of local photographer Félix Arnaudin to preserve that disappearing landscape in images. Taken together, these chapters evidence the active role images played in renegotiating the meaning of land in post-Revolutionary France, and I argue for a more expansive view of the promise and possibility of landscape representation in both consolidating the nation and registering local reaction.