Headed to Binghamton this week to talk through material from my new book! 🤓

Remarkable Guillaume Lethière show at the Louvre right now. Son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved woman of mixed race, Lethière was one of the most successful artists in early 19th-c France. Through the show a larger community of Caribbean artists in Paris comes into view as well.

CFP: Romantic Shock and Surprise

Sorbonne Université, Paris, Friday 16 – Saturday 17 May 2025

full call here: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=5530

This Friday Katie Hornstein, Kelly Presutti, C.C. McKee, Maura Coughlin and I are talking about 'Keywords for Ecocriticism in Francophone Visual Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century' for H-France! (link below)

CFP: The Geological Imagination in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Huntington Library, California 4-5 April 2025
Details here: tinyurl.com/5byd6he6

Painting in Steam
Please note this event begins at 2pm UK time, not 3pm as previously advertised.
My apologies for the error.

My new book 'Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction, 1780-1850' will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press! It asks: how did various forms of picturing make the natural world assimilable to the protocols of extraction in Europe and its colonial networks?

Speaking next Friday about John Martin and infrastructure for 'Rethinking Victorian Mediascapes' organized by my colleague Luke Gartlan -- looking forward to it!

Although it's a "romantic" landscape, someone viewing this painting circa 1820 would have instantly recognized it as a modern, artificially planted, and highly managed woodland. In it, Friedrich portrays the beauty of the technocratic values of resource management.

Friedrich, Evening, c 1820

Is it just me or does this 'scary' 'dragon' by Albrecht Aldorfer look like a goofy lil rooster

just taught a week on the colonial and commercial history of pigments and suddenly this painting - with its Prussian blue and Indian Yellow - looks unfamiliar and interesting

'Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism' is now out in paperback! This discount code, which is good for the next 12 months, offers 20% off.
Art history books are often prohibitively expensive, so I'm thrilled this is available at a more accessible price.