Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture ed. by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart (review)

For humanities scholars, the Anthropocene periodizes a history of imperiled and imperiling human existence that demands interdisciplinary explanation. The scope and scale of the explanation required has compelled a widening of focus for entire subfields now charged with addressing long-unnoticed particulars of ecological crisis in the intersections of multiple fields of study. In nineteenth-century visual studies, this has meant an expansion from art historical considerations of the pastoral toward study of a far wider range of human objects and interventions. The sheer complexity of the nineteenth-century material environment is satisfyingly addressed by Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart and illustrated extensively with both black-and-white figures and color plates. The eighteen short essays included within the collection are divided into five sections interleaved with a series of contextual introductions, each emphasizing, following Karl Kusserow, that "ecocriticism is not merely a method but a habit of mind" (2).

These sections of the collection—political and material ecologies, natural resource management, agricultural husbandry, and animal histories—follow an ecocritical logic; art historians and other visual studies scholars will likely, as the editors note, find multiple other ways to group the approaches. Some essays resituate familiar famous works in new contexts, such as Joan Greer's linkage of Vincent van Gogh's painting Giant Peacock Moth (1889) not with French Post-Impressionism, but rather with Willem Roselof's earlier Hague School landscape In the Floodplains of the River Ijssel (1870–97) in order to describe a new art-historical category of nineteenth-century "ecological envisioning" (208). Other essays elevate lesser-known decorative objects for closer scrutiny, like Naomi Slipp's study of the plant and animal life highlighted on Rutherford B. Hayes's presidential dining service. And still others use fine and decorative arts as a stepping-off point for discussion of a broader environmental concern, as in Laura Turner Igoe's use of Randolph Rogers's sculpture Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (1861) to anchor an investigation of the practices of mining Carrara marble in the nineteenth century.

As these brief summaries make clear, the diversity of the collection's essays makes its contribution especially valuable for readers interested in quickly surveying a variety of methodologies and subject matters appropriate to this growing field. Coughlin and Gephart's introductory materials help situate the interventions of the individual essays while also laying out the key theoretical underpinnings of the collection, which draws from nineteenth-century and contemporary studies as well as academic and curatorial models in an attempt to resituate traditional art historical frameworks of biography and provenance. The essays in the collection cluster around the visual culture of the nineteenth-century Americas, including George Philip LeBourdais on George Henry Durrie's "cryoscapes" of snowy New England scenes that freeze their mid-century bucolic homesteads against narrative progress, Caroline L. Gillaspie's evocation of the global commodity trade in a study of Francis Guy's Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C. (c. 1797), and Shana Klein's survey of Cincinnati horticulturalists' engagement with the African-American artist Robert Duncanson's still-life paintings of fruit (93). Going a bit further afield, Annie Ronan follows the loving destruction of Albert Laessle's goat sculpture Billy (1914) within Rittenhouse Square Park in Philadelphia, Jessica Landau theorizes the self-defeatingly anti-conservationist effects of trap camera photography by George Shiras, and Emily Gephart and Michael Rossi show the complex ecocritical conversation spurred in American periodicals by condemnations of the fashion for ladies' millinery decorated with bird plumage—the accompanying Punch cartoons of these rapacious hat-wearers make particularly striking illustration here.

British and European fine art, though not the main focus of the collection, offers a good opportunity for authors to continue existing art historical scholarship in...