This event celebrates the publication of Stephanie O’Rourke’s major new book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and its Colonial Networks, 1780-1850 (Chicago UP, 2025). O’Rourke’s timely book explores the deep links between landscape representation and resource extraction during the first decades of Europe’s industrial revolutions. Landscape painting was both profoundly shaped by extractive industries, such as mining and forestry, and can reveal attitudes towards an emergent logic of extractivism that continues to shape our world. The book makes an essential contribution to debates about landscape, environment, technology and industry.
This panel discussion, featuring O’Rourke in conversation with distinguished Professors John Tresch and Susan Siegfried, will illuminate the book’s key themes.
Organised by Esther Chadwick, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, Courtauld Institute.
Speakers:
Stephanie O’Rourke is Senior Lecturer in Art History, University of St Andrews. She specialises in European art, focusing on the intersections of resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), her first book, considers the relationship between art and the production of scientific knowledge at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Her second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025), examines how European landscapes reflected emerging industries like mining and timber harvesting, alongside concepts of race, climate, and waste.
John Tresch is Professor of History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, University of London. He writes on intersections of technology, human and natural sciences, politics and arts. He is author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago, 2012), The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (FSG, 2021), and the forthcoming Cosmograms: How to Do Things with Worlds (Chicago).
Susan L. Siegfried is Denise Riley Collegiate Professor Emerita of the History of Art and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan. Her latest book is The New Taste: Fashion and Art in the 1820s and the 1830s (2026). Related research includes ‘Millais and Yellow’, Oxford Art Journal (2025), ‘The Allure of Dress in Ingres and Picasso’ in Picasso Ingres: Face to Face (2022) and ‘Fashion in the Life of George Sand’ (with John Finkelberg), Fashion Theory 26 (2020). She also published Ingres: Painting Reimagined (2009), Staging Empire (with Todd Porterfield, 2006), and The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (1995).
Esther Chadwick is Senior Lecturer and Head of the History of Art Department at the Courtauld. Her book, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2024.
