Open lecture: Frédéric Ogée

English landscape design, landscape art and the Anthropo(s)cenic (1750–1850)

On October 26th, the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture is hosting an open lecture by Frédéric Ogée.

The growing importance of ecological concerns and its transcription into the new discipline of eco-criticism have identified the first half of the 19th century as a possible starting point for the Anthropocene, a period when the profound effects of the two Industrial Revolutions could be felt and seen, when man’s imprint upon Nature became primordial, essential and irreversible.

With their new ‘landscape garden’ and the subsequent rise of picturesque tourism and landscape painting, the British developed a new, empirical exploration of man’s frictional inscription within Nature. The natural world seemed no longer considered as man’s ‘environment’, something peripheral surrounding man’s central presence, in their works Nature IS the center, and is somehow restored as the source of knowledge and truth. Yet this revolution is ambivalent when we know that the main patrons of these English landscapists were also the main actors of the industrial revolution and colonial expansionism, which consisted primarily in commodifying and ‘exploiting’ both nature and man.

Frédéric Ogée is Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité. His main publications include two collections of essays on English artist William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France’? The circulation of ideas across the Channel in the 18th century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006), J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019). In 2006-07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre. He is currently working on a series of monographs on 18th and 19th-century British artists – Thomas Lawrence, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth – to be published by Cohen & Cohen (Paris). The first one, Thomas Lawrence – Le génie du portrait anglais came out in December 2022. The next one, on Turner, will be published in the fall of 2024. From 2014 to 2017 he was a member of Tate Britain’s Advisory Council, and since 2014 of the City of Paris Scientific Council. In 2018-19 he was a Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and also a Neilson Professor at Smith College, Massachusetts. Next summer he will be a visiting lecturer in Beijing, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of International Business and Economics.