ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at landscape, landscape painting and conceptions of space in France during the last years of the ancien regime. The French Revolution may have had a seismic effect on citizens’ concepts of spatiality and visual culture, but the picture that immediately precedes it is by no means clear. The book explores the configuration of space during the Revolutionary decade. It examines landscape and landscape painting after Bonaparte’s coup of 18 Brumaire. Although there were numerous instances in which the government promoted traditional forms of classically inspired painting, a genre well suited to an administration keen to assert its authority as Antiquity’s successor, the period also saw the production of wholly new forms of landscape. The book provides some of the ways in which landscape representation remained central in the articulation of the new post-Imperial vision.
