This lecture charts the emergence of new pictorial formats for representing landscape that derived from and accelerated industrial mineral extraction in Britain in the early nineteenth century. These formats, in turn, actively assimilated colonial environments in North America and India into a system of extractive capitalism through which Britain consolidated both economic and territorial power. In an alternative account of nineteenth-century landscape, this talk explores how various pictorial formats alternately enabled or disabled this process.
Stephanie O'Rourke is a historian of European art particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also collaborates with artists and climate scientists to explore landscapes of extraction in the present day.
Her book Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press; awarded the Rosemary Mitchell Book Prize, BAVS 2026) examines how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Multi-national in its scope, this book explores how European landscapes pictured the natural environment in relation to specific extractive industries such as mining and timber harvesting as well as emerging concepts about race, climate, and waste operative within the continent and its colonial networks.