The QMUL Visual & Material Forum, in partnership with the QMUL Centre for Eighteenth-Century’s Studies, is delighted to announce that

Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews)

will be speaking on

Forest Histories

4-5pm on Wednesday, 18 November 2020

The talk is free and will be held online via MS Teams. Please register to receive the MS Teams link via this form: https://forms.gle/QRYrqN7Eyy6btbZ58

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Talk Abstract

The forest has its own time—one that does not necessarily align with the timescales that govern the social and political lives of humans.  In late eighteenth-century France, this fact was difficult to ignore. Mounting anxieties about timber shortages were coming in conflict with traditional woodlands management and access rights. Politicians and writers were increasingly aware of the distinct historicity of France’s forest. Yet this was also a period during which, it is often observed, the events of the French Revolution were reframing how human history itself was understood.

This paper considers how late eighteenth-century landscape paintings accommodated and responded to these developments: the recognition of the forest’s non-human histories, on the one hand, and new ways of framing human history, on the other. I proposes that by picturing the human and the natural alongside one another, certain landscape paintings were uniquely equipped to explore how these histories could be rendered mutually comprehensible.