The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) share a legacy of landscape study rooted in the collections of Paul and Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon. While the Mellons’ collecting practices differed, they both gathered significant materials in the history of British environments, horticulture, and landscapes. Notable examples include Paul Mellon’s paintings and prints by George Stubbs and J. M. W. Turner and Bunny Mellon’s garden treatises and Humphry Repton Red Books. From these origins, the YCBA’s extensive collection of British art has encouraged generations of new scholarship on British landscape art, while OSGF has become a leading research institution for the global histories and futures of gardens, landscapes, and plants. Inspired by this legacy of collecting and scholarship, the YCBA and OSGF are hosting a symposium at Yale to bring together new interdisciplinary research on British landscape studies.
By commingling the diversity of approaches to the histories and depictions of landscapes and environments represented by the two institutions, this symposium aims to generate new scholarly conversation about the intersections of British culture, ecology, and land.
This symposium will be held at Hastings Hall, Yale School of Architecture, on December 5–6, 2024.
For more information, please email sarah.leonard@yale.edu.
Schedule
Download a PDF of the schedule.
Thursday, December 5, 2024
1:15–1:30 pm
Welcome and Introduction
Sarah Mead Leonard, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art
1:30–2:30 pm
Panel One: Rethinking the Atlantic World
Chair: David Sadighian, Assistant Professor, Yale School of Architecture
This panel presents new ways to imagine and interrogate the British Atlantic world, from eighteenth-century pleasure gardens in England to the contemporary Afro-diasporic Caribbean landscape.
Garden Grottos: Refuge, Pleasure, and Disaster in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Joseph Litts, PhD Candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
Ancestral Rewilding in the Anglophone Caribbean
Giulia Smith, Mid-Career Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Senior Tutor, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
2:30–3 pm
Break
3–4:30 pm
Panel Two: Shaping the Colonial Landscape
Chair: Therese O’Malley, Associate Dean Emeritus, Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Art, National Gallery of Art
This session examines how imperial British tastes and policies shaped cultural and physical landscapes across periods and locations: Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century, South Africa in the nineteenth century, and the Middle East in the early twentieth century.
“We might have had our Lands long ago”: Making the Landscape of Sierra Leone British
Jonah Rowen, Assistant Professor, The New School|Parsons School of Design
Cape Town’s “Company Gardens”: A British Imperial Landscape?
Noëleen Murray, Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria
A Very British Holy Land: British-Ruled Palestine and the Creation/Curation of the Jerusalem Landscape, 1917–1926
James Sunderland, Research Fellow, Woolf Institute, University of Cambridge
Friday, December 6, 2024
10–10:10 am
Welcome
Sarah Mead Leonard, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art
10:10–11:40 am
Panel Three: The Early Nineteenth-Century Landscape Garden, Inside and Out
Chair: Mark Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery
Exploring one of the most significant periods in the development of British landscape gardens and landscape art, this panel presents new perspectives on the domestic interior and examines the role of the period’s burgeoning popular press.
“From the Drawing Room window”: Framing the Early Nineteenth-Century Landscape
Anne Nellis Richter, Adjunct Faculty, Smith College Smithsonian Internship Program, Washington, DC
Interacting with the Landscape: Fenestration in British Domestic Architecture at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Rebecca Tropp, Archivist, Crosby Moran Hall, London
Samuel Palmer’s Trees: Landscape Gardening, Book Publishing, and Landscape Painting in the 1820s
Christiana Payne, Professor Emerita of History of Art, Oxford Brookes University
11:40 am – 1 pm
Lunch Break
1–2:30 pm
Panel Four: Animal and Mineral
Chair: Edward Cooke, Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
This session considers the natural—and unnatural—materials and lives of landscapes through the topics of extraction, agriculture, and artistic reproduction in Britain and its empire.
Robert Hills and the Ecologies of Landscape Painting in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Kimberly Rhodes, Professor of Art History, Drew University
The Crystallization of Patna Painting: Mica, Mining, and Art at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Margaret Masselli, PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture, Brown University
Modern Wastelands: Slag Landscapes in Twentieth-Century British Art
Tobah Aukland-Peck, PhD Candidate in Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
2:30–3 pm
Break
3–3:10 pm
Keynote Introduction
3:10–4:40 pm
Keynote
Finola O’Kane, Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, and Stephen Daniels, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Nottingham, in conversation with Sir Peter Crane, Director, Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
The keynote conversation will discuss a selection of works from the collections of the Yale Center for British Art and Oak Spring Garden Foundation to consider the foundations of the study of British landscapes and landscape art, the current state of the field, and future directions for study. Engaging with subjects covered throughout the two days of this symposium, the discussion will include interrogations of extractive, industrial, imperial, and nationalistic landscapes.
4:40–4:50 pm
Closing Remarks
Christina Ferando, Head of Academic Affairs, Yale Center for British Art
Top image
Jan Siberechts, Wollaton Hall and Park, Nottinghamshire, detail, 1697, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
