In the nineteenth century, Orientalism functioned as a Western tool for dominating and restructuring the perception of the Orient. In France, where Orientalism found favor amongst artists, Orientalist works were produced in the literary and visual arts to inform and control the narrative about the East. Influenced by the Napoleonic imperial conquests and an increased French presence in the East, Orientalism became an integral movement in the French visual arts. The relationship between France and the Orient was one of power and domination, which was mirrored in that between the French and the Blacks. As a part of the Western perception of the Other, the black individual had a unique role in nineteenth-century France. To be black in nineteenth-century French society was to be a second-class citizen. The existence of slavery, the increase in French ethnography, and racism in French society objectified the black individual, turning them into another symbol of French power and conquest. The exploration of this project will focus on the symbolic representation of the black body in nineteenth-century Orientalist visual art. As two separate areas of exploration in Art History, Orientalism and Race Theory have seen growth in scholarship thanks to contemporary interests in race and post-colonial theory. However, the overlap between the two subject areas is limited in research. Through the analysis of black figures in nineteenth-century Orientalism, we can discover more about the role of the Black individual with respect to European society and the Eastern cultures in which they existed. This research project explores depictions of Blacks in nineteenth-century Orientalist art to clarify their societal roles and explore the imbalance of social perception and representation in nineteenth-century French society. This project will reveal the truths hidden within the depictions of the black form.

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This dissertation examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States. As a genre aligned with the goals of nation building, landscape maintained a privileged artistic status for much of the nineteenth century. Yet as frontier development, land speculation, environmental change, and other factors slowly rendered its conventions meaningless, landscape became the site through which American artists most urgently sought to come to terms with the modern world. This argument is anchored by unorthodox artworks, from landscapes resembling banknotes to paintings made out of bird feathers—limit cases that allude to the failure of landscape in sustaining American cultural goals. Chapter One concerns Albert Bierstadt's aesthetic struggles in post-frontier America. During the 1890s, Bierstadt's anxieties about landscape surfaced in the particularities of objects that fold and unfold, from butterflies painted by chance to expanding railway cars—objects that might be considered the subconscious of a genre built upon expansionist ideology. Chapter Two argues that Martin Johnson Heade's tropical and marsh paintings of the 1870s and 1880s used “groundless” conditions to express cultural insecurities about traversable land and its representation. The pictorial blockages and interferences in Heade's paintings challenge both the compositional legibility espoused in the blockbuster canvases of his mentor and rival Frederic Church and the physical accessibility promised by the period's environmental interventions. Chapter Three proposes that Ralph Blakelock's nocturnes and money paintings—produced in the context of rampant land speculation, volatile art markets, and representational doubts surrounding paper currency—attempt but fail to overcome landscape's monetary entanglements. Blakelock's paintings theorize the value of labor and material accumulation in the increasingly abstract economic world of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four reconsiders the trope of the "figure in the landscape" using Abbott Thayer's turn-of-the-century representations of animal camouflage. In these mixed-media artworks, Thayer's attempts to visualize invisibility demonstrate the ways in which camouflage proved irreconcilable with landscape's figure-ground principles. Together, these episodes trace pictorial attempts to resolve spatial problems arising with modernity, and in so doing, they signal a shift toward new paradigms of representation. / History of Art and Architecture