UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Nature and Power: The Game Sill Lifes of Jan Weenix (1641-1719)(2023) Altizer, Kathleen Joanna; Wheelock, Arthur K; Colontuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Dutch artist Jan Weenix (1641-1719) was the most successful game painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Specializing in large-scale still lifes that foregrounded naturalistically depicted game arranged before ornate garden views, these innovative images were highly sought after by wealthy merchants, Dutch nobles, and German princes alike. Despite the renown of Weenix’s art in his own time and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these paintings have never been the focus of in-depth critical analysis. Scholarship on Weenix has mostly concentrated on his early Italianate landscapes and his wall panels, while interpretations of his game paintings have almost exclusively focused on their place within the long tradition of dead animal painting in Northern art, beginning with sixteenth-century Flemish market scenes. This dissertation departs from this approach by arguing that Weenix’s game paintings are best understood within the dramatic cultural shifts and political upheavals of William III’s stadholderate (1672-1702). It was during this period that Weenix first specialized in game paintings. At this time, estate ownership, hunting, and garden design were becoming newly significant performances of authority, wealth, and power, both among members of the wealthy merchant patriciate and at William III’s court. Tracing Weenix’s evolution as a game painter alongside the cultural-political history of Dutch hunting practices and gardens, I explore the nuanced ways in which Weenix’s art drew from a myriad of contemporary visual sources to stylistically and conceptually promote his patrons’ belonging to a community of pan-European elites. I show how merchant collectors sought out Weenix’s game paintings as representations of estate ownership, which had become an increasingly significant marker of inherited wealth and dynastic privilege among the merchant class. In the same period, hunting and garden art became invested with new political meanings as Stadtholder William III made hunting a centerpiece of Dutch court life for the first time, while his courtiers developed magnificent gardens to celebrate his military achievements. I prove that Weenix’s art directly refers to these activities and spaces, enabling those inside and outside the court to adopt the imagery of political power to promote their own status. Combining a sustained visual analysis of Weenix’s game paintings with an in-depth study of his patronage, I demonstrate how Weenix’s art reflected and furthered the aspirations of his patrons, and consequently participated in the construction of elite social identities. I conclude that, through Weenix’s art, collectors claimed the right to to exercise control over nature, identifying themselves with pan-European nobility and ultimately illustrating their participation in the establishment of cultural and political hegemony over their domains.Item Chaos and the Microcosm: Literary Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century(2009) Scott, Heidi; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precursors of ecological science. I argue that literary epistemology in the long nineteenth-century developed precocious theories of the way nature operates based on contingent narrative and microcosm systems. These ideas were adopted as empirical strategies once scientific ecology emerged in the twentieth-century, and both tropes are prominent in twenty-first century ecological science. Ecology appeared late among scientific disciplines partly because it relies on cooperation between reduction and holism: climate change theory, for example, uses microcosm models to develop narratives of environmental contingency. Five chapters consider these two tropes from historical, literary, and scientific perspectives. The first chapter is a historical introduction to nineteenth-century science that traces the development of environmental awareness from industrial pollution and early studies of nature in microcosm, especially in the work of Charles Darwin and Stephen Forbes. Chapter two investigates four narratives of environmental chaos spanning the long nineteenth-century: Gilbert White, Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells emplot the radical new notion of a post-apocalypse environment in narratives that rely on chaotic discontinuity, rather than the coherent gradualism that marked evolutionary theories of the time. Chapter three examines microcosmic imagery in the work of several important poets, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. I argue that the imagination and close observation of nineteenth-century poets helped the nascent sciences conceive of ways to simplify nature without dismembering its complex structures. Chapter four, devoted to the ecological thinking of John Keats, traces his abandonment of teleological narrative in Hyperion in preference for the microcosmic Odes. Finally, chapter five reconciles the two tropes with an excursion into modern ecosystem science, paying particular attention to our contemporary strategies for investigating climate change. This chapter serves as a summation of the dissertation by complicating the dichotomy between chaotic narrative and model-microcosm, and it brings the study into concerns of the present day.