West: The black Atlantic and the American sublime

West: The black Atlantic and the American sublime

Explore the legacy of British landscape painting in the United States

Landscape painters were employed by slaveholders in the Caribbean to create picturesque views of their plantations – ambivalent and complex works.

Thomas Cole brought the picturesque to the Hudson Valley; Frederic Church moved south to seek the sublime in the Andes, while others, like Thomas Moran, headed west, to the Rockies and beyond.

We conclude by asking whether the legacies of imperial vision still condition our responses to landscape today?

Global landscape in the age of Empire

How does the rise of landscape painting connect with the British Empire?

This five-part lecture series follows British 18th- and 19th-century artists to Australia, the Caribbean, India, and the Americas. Learn how they struggled to adapt landscape traditions to represent the terrain and people they confronted.

Their encounters with other civilisations were often violent and the resulting paintings and prints – by artists such as Richard Wilson, Turner and Frederic Church – were vivid, ambivalent, responses to an often painful history.

The Paul Mellon lectures

Named in honour of the philanthropist and collector of British art, Paul Mellon, these biennial lectures are given by a distinguished historian of British art.

Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, delivers this year's lectures.

Barringer specialises in the 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century art of Britain and the British Empire, 19th-century American and German art, and museum studies

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His many publications include 'Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain' (2005) and 'Art and the British Empire' (2007). He is co-curator, with Elizabeth Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and National Gallery, London, 2018). He is finishing a book, 'Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock.'

Image above: Detail from Thomas Moran, 'The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone', 1872 © U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, INTR 03001