Description

British and American landscape became an increasingly powerful artistic medium during the “long 19th century” and reached a pinnacle of achievement with painters such as Turner, Constable, Cole and Moran. From English country estates and industrial towns to the vast panoramas of the American West, landscape paintings celebrated both natural and built environments, documented lived experiences and shaped public opinion and government policy. Beyond mere representation of the natural world, landscape painting became a means of representing colonial imperialism and faith in the value of progress. Not just pretty pictures, nineteenth-century landscape paintings need to be analyzed in a broader context to examine the cultural, historical and aesthetic constructions that shape these images. Aurora University professor of art history Dr. Libby Escobedo earned her bachelor’s in art history at UCLA before continuing on to graduate study at Bryn Mawr College where she focused on fourteenth-century English illuminated manuscripts. Escobedo joined the faculty at Aurora University as an assistant professor in fall 2007, teaching art history, humanities and interdisciplinary studies.