ABSTRACT

The growing importance of ecological concerns and its transcription into the new discipline of ecocriticism have identified the first half of the nineteenth century as a possible starting point for the Anthropocene. What this chapter argues, based on the close analysis of three paintings exhibited by Turner in 1818, is that the main subject of landscape art as Turner conceived it is an acknowledgement and exploration of this frictional inscription of man’s presence within Nature. The remarkable coincidence of the Industrial Revolutions with the triumph of landscape as the greatest pictorial genre in the English school of art has led to the emergence of what has recently been conceptualised by David Matless as “the Anthropo(s)cenic.” Quite strikingly, in Constable and Turner’s works, the “natural world” is not considered as man’s “environment,” but Nature is the centre. This subtle displacement of what is central, of what matters, between man and nature is, to my mind, the main revolution introduced by the English landscapists of the period who replaced the centrality of man and of man’s control over Nature – the main characteristic of both classical history painting and colonialism – with the extraordinary symphonic force with which they endowed Nature in the “real” scenes they depicted.