A new art exhibit at Yale looks back on 19th century landscapes to learn about society’s impact on nature.
The “Natural Histories” exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery consists of 10 paintings from the mid-1800s, primarily showcasing New England landscapes to learn how these environments have changed over time.
WSHU’s Jane Montalto spoke with Mark Mitchell, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery, to learn more about the exhibit.
WSHU: What can someone today, who's like looking at the landscapes featured in the exhibits, learn from the mid-1800s? And what do they tell us about environmental issues?
MM: Well, they tell us that the landscape that we currently inhabit in the northeastern part of the United States is a landscape that has been changing for a very long time, and that humans have had widespread impact.
And in the 19th century, one of the many revelations of this experience for me has been to recognize that the late 19th century…was the highest point of deforestation in recorded history of this region. And I think for most visitors, that is a bit of an epiphany, that for most of us, I think we assume that the arc of impact has been constantly progressing, and that impact has grown over time. So the idea that forests in New England had been regrowing and recuperating, and reestablishing since the late 19th century is a surprise.
And I think that that is something that we all kind of have not, in some cases, put before ourselves, and understood that agriculture was really much more widespread in the 19th century, and that in the later 19th century, when cities really started to become population centers, and people became less self-sustaining, and started to move to cities where they had things like grocery stores, that there was a real shift in Americans' relationship to the landscape, and to nature, generally, sort of awareness of the natural world that diminished drastically.
And it's in many ways, reflective of where many of us now are, who live in urban or settled areas. And so this is an opportunity to kind of think about how landscape paintings of the 19th century record relationships to the land in that time that is different from what we might assume.
WSHU: Do you have an example of one of the works that best exemplifies what you're saying about how deforestation has changed over time?
MM: Yeah, so I worked with two professors here at Yale, Craig Brodersen and Marlyse Duguid, who have been great resources, and, frankly, provided most of the content of the installation. So I was sort of, you know, a facilitator, in a lot of ways, rather than an organizer, but it was really a revelation to me. And I know that Craig in particular really responded to a work of art that I haven't had an opportunity to really show since I've been here by Alexander Lawrie, a landscape that depicts the eastern slope of the Adirondack Mountains in Essex County, New York way upstate New York called "Pleasant Valley, Essex County, New York," Adirondacks.
And it is a beautiful view of a small town that is sort of in the flatlands in the middle ground of the painting. And you're sort of on a rise, overlooking a mountainous landscape, looking west into the Adirondacks. And you can see the progression of the fields. And then the growth of the pastures starting to climb up the mountain sides and the distance, where trees are harder and harder to get to and harder and harder to remove for firewood or for construction, or what have you. And so as you climb the mountain sides, it's less likely that a business or somebody who wants to use those trees for some commercial purpose is going to be able to economically extract them for the purposes of use — either milling or firewood or what have you.
And so, the painting really provides an overview of how the sort of population growth and the gradual reach of this settlement has impacted the forests all around it in this very expansive landscape. And so it's really informative. And for Craig, it felt like a sort of a summary of a lot of the aspects of deforestation that were happening in that period. And, you know, it's a painting from 1867. So it really is just after the Civil War, and in this moment of greatest agricultural deforestation.
WSHU: And going off of that, when you mentioned those that you worked with, I was curious about what the collaboration between you and other faculty members went into creating the exhibit?
MM: I am not a professor of forestry or of the environment. And so the delight of having a chance to talk with people who really study both the history of the American forest as well as the observable qualities of tree succession. And what these paintings tell us is what the information contained in the paintings is, from the standpoint of forest development, it has been such an education for me.
And so whereas, as an art historian, I tend to look at works of art stylistically, aesthetically — I tend to look at them as sources of information about cultural priorities at the time, what do people like and why. And this installation has taken a different approach, which is to use information about the natural world as a way to understand what these artists were focused on at a very particular time in American history.
WSHU: What is ecocritical art history? And why does it matter?
MM: Well, ecocritical art history, while a sort of a funny term, is really just a way of saying putting environmental considerations first when we study art history. And so, what do we understand about the natural world and its changes and human impact by looking at these works of art, with the environment in mind and the history of the environment in mind.
And so by using that as a lens, in a time, when we're very sensitive to the changes to the climate that are going on around us, it is really a chance for us to think differently about the history of art and how it records relationships to the natural world that perhaps we haven't put first in the past. And so it is one of many tools that have developed in recent decades to help us think differently about works of art from historical and geographically disparate periods, places to to understand the history of art differently.
