As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land-use pressure, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on pre-industrial forests with highly-detailed, full-color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings’ potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity. In this research, we used tools and knowledge from humanities and from the ecological sciences to address these concerns and evaluate the validity of forest paintings by nineteenth-century artists as a potential data set for historical ecology research. Inclusion of insights from art history scholarship, alongside a critical evaluation of artists’ notes, sketches, and compositions, show the degree to which many for artists – particularly those committed to painting on site in the woods (encompassing many in the Hudson River School of Art) – painted accurate images.  It is also true, however, that many artists did exaggerate their work. A key outcome from this work is therefore a pathway for evaluation of historic artwork, which is detailed in our primary publication in the open-access Ecological Society of America journal, Ecosphere.

In regard to forest ecosystem ecology in particular, we found support for the potential use of many of historic paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research that can be linked to ecosystem processes (e.g. relationships between structural complexity and rates of primary production; relationships among decay, downed wood and standing dead wood relative to tree mortality rates and demographics), but we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images that will help ensure rigor in the application of this work. A key conclusion of this research work is that paintings are highly dependable sources of information about historical ecological conditions – as long as one understands that nineteenth-century painting practices centered typological veracity. Paintings evaluated here were often accurate as to the type, details, and functioning of an ecosystem represented even for paintings that were not the reproduction of a single specific location. This finding provides a nuanced in understanding our capacity to use different paintings within the field of historical ecology, and offers researchers context to assessing landscape representations. Beyond forest ecosystems, the framework developed in this research has potential for other fields of scientific research. Providing a pathway for assessing 19th century work will be important for other researchers who may want to use historic paintings to look into the past to understand climate change (for example assessing changes in glacial extent or coastal sea levels and landscape development).

An additional key outcome from this work has been the development of collaborative and co-developed scholarship in science and the humanities together.  The integration of the perspectives of contemporary science (as opposed to the history of science) into humanities fields has been limited, despite decades of interest in merging the science and humanities. Working with art historians showed us the importance of context in regard to individual artists, art communities, and contemporaneous social dynamics (e.g. growing naturalist movement of the 19th century) that provides information needed to evaluate veracity of landscape art. At the outset, we imagined that there could be capacity within this project for amassing large collections of individual paintings of particular sites that could be used in historical ecology research. We achieved this for a smaller subset of paintings, but establishing a larger set of paintings will take more time  as rigorous assessment of paintings requires archival work (e.g. reviewing works and writing in museums, private collections, historical societies, and the like).  We have also been able to show how providing ecological perspectives to art historical research can advance and expand perspectives in that field – in particular the emerging sub-field of art history known as ecocritical art history.  By providing greater ecological context for historic artwork, we were able to identify aspects of the landscape captured by naturalist painters of the mid-nineteenth century that help art historians to understand the processes that artists portrayed on their canvases. 

Last Modified: 07/03/2023
Modified by: Dana R Warren