SESSION: Landscapes of Extraction: Colonial and Industrial Histories of British Landscapes, 1700-1900 (FULL-DAY PART 1)
This panel will explore the complex interplay of colonial wealth and industrial development in British landscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Britain’s imperial reach expanded, wealth amassed through colonial exploitation fuelled drastic transformations of the British countryside, from Capability Brown’s ‘naturalistic’ landscapes to the copper works of South Wales. Equally, pictorial representations of British landscape registered the physical and social spaces being reshaped by the rise of what Andreas Malm calls ‘fossil capital’. This panel invites papers that interrogate seemingly picturesque or idyllic depictions of the British landscape by attending to their embeddedness in the interlocking operations of colonial domination and resource extraction. We also welcome papers that examine critical representations of the British landscape as a site of exploitation or despoilation. Alongside paintings, prints, and photographs, we will consider maps, technical diagrams, and other pictorial formats to uncover the diverse perspectives on industry, energy, pollution, race, and empire that emerged during this period.
Topics may include the representation of colonial wealth in ‘country house portraits’, the imperial or industrial ties of lauded British painters or patrons, and the celebration, critique, or erasure of colonial and industrial extraction in landscape paintings. We particularly encourage submissions that broaden ‘British’ art by focusing on Welsh, Scottish, and Irish landscapes and painters, as well as papers considering the colonial and environmental legacies of British imperialism and industrial development.
Session Convenors:
Eleanor Stephenson, University of Cambridge
Stephanie O’Rourke, University of St Andrews
Session Speakers:
Mary-Ann Constantine, University of Wales
Picturesque Underscapes: Four Views on Holywell Stream
In 1792, the great print entrepreneur John Boydell, then in his 70s and in the middle of his ambitious Shakespeare Gallery project, published a set of ‘Four Views on Holywell Stream’. These picturesque views of industrial sites were made by local artist John Ingleby of Halkyn, a village near Holywell in Flintshire, and engraved by William Watts. They are accompanied by a blurb that succinctly combines all the elements one might tease out of a place so extraordinarily dense in buildings, texts, images, connections, and activities that it acts like a microcosm of the period. With its water turning the wheels and filling the dams of cotton-mills, wire-mills, paper-mills and copper-mills in a frenetic mile down the Greenfield Valley to the Dee Estuary, the stream gushing from the Catholic shrine at St Winifred’s Well was both transformative and transformed.
These ‘Four Views’ were pasted into an extra-illustrated copy of Thomas Pennant’s History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (1796), a work which reprises and revisits some of the iconic descriptions of his earlier Tour in Wales (1778): in just under twenty years, the ‘possessed’ valley has drastically changed. Developing work undertaken for the Curious Travellers project, this paper delves into the darker ‘underscapes’ of Boydell’s marketable, picturesque framing of industry, taking the ‘Four Views’ and the accompanying text as a hyper-local lens through which to examine an international web of personal, cultural and commercial connections that stretch from Holywell to the other side of the world, and back.
Eleanor Stephenson, University of Cambridge
Landscapes of Extraction: Philippe de Loutherbourg and the Morris Family’s Copper Works, Swansea
In the summer of 1786, French-born British painter Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) sketched the Fforest Copper Works in Swansea, a site owned by the Welsh industrialist Morris family. From the early eighteenth century, Robert Morris (c. 1701-1768) and his son, Sir John Morris (1745-1819), developed one of the world’s largest copper works in the Swansea area, selling Welsh-made goods to Atlantic slave traders and East India Company merchants. The Morris family’s fortune was built on extracting copper ore from Cornwall and coal from South Wales, significantly reshaping local landscapes through the construction of dockyards, smelting factories, worker towns, and a Neoclassical country house, Clasemont.
To document the landscapes and properties from which the Morris family profited, Sir John Morris and his sister, Margaret Desenfans (née Morris) (1731-1814), the lesser-known founder of Dulwich Picture Gallery, invited artists to Swansea. In 1782, Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois (1756-1811) painted Clasemont and the surrounding landscape. Four years later, de Loutherbourg, who had previously taught Bourgeois, documented the Morris estate in a series of sketches. This paper examines de Loutherbourg’s sketches as objects that reveal the interlocking industrial and colonial connections embedded within British landscapes. Using archival evidence from the Richard Burton Archives, the National Library of Wales, and the Dulwich College Archives, I explore how various forms of extraction underpinned the development of British landscape painting and public collections in significant and unexpected ways.
Zoë Dostal, Amherst College
Picturing Industrial Colonisation in The Irish Linen Industry
William Hincks’s The Irish Linen Industry, a twelve-part series of stipple engravings first printed in 1785, seems to evade, or even resist, critical analysis. Full sets can be found in museums across the British Isles and North America, where curators and scholars have relied on these popular prints as practical illustrations of turning flax into cloth in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Hincks promised veracity, claiming that he had ‘drawn on the Spot’ the various landscapes, machinery, and labourers involved in ‘the Process of the Linen Manufactory of Ireland in all its different Stages’. In this paper, I resist the series’s purported documentary clarity to show how Hincks’s idyllic scenes functioned as Anglo-Irish propaganda that used georgic and picturesque devices to naturalise the industrial colonisation of Irish land and people, especially in the north. The Irish Linen Board established the linen industry not just for the benefit of the British economy, but as a tool of political control and Anglicisation. As the final print in the series, a depiction of the Linen Hall in Dublin, reveals, the flax grown, spun, woven, and bleached in Irish fields was destined for transatlantic colonial markets. What appears throughout the series as a humble and bucolic cottage industry was in fact a major export trade designed to supply coarse linens to enslavers in the Caribbean and North America. Printed on high-quality paper likely made from linen rags, the engravings not just document, but are materially enmeshed in a cycle of resource extraction in the Atlantic World, from the former Plantation of Ulster to the plantations of the ‘New World’.