Séminaire OAB 'Angloseen': an Ecocritical Reading of British Art History

Guest speaker: Sophie Mesplède, Université Rennes 2

Can art historians critically rethink concepts that are fundamental to art history, such as time and scale, in ways that are productive for an intersectional eco-politics? What the humanities more generally contribute is a discernible perception of the continuum between nature and culture, doing away with the generally national mythologization, and isolation, of the wilderness (William Cronon’s “the Trouble with Wilderness”, Haraway, and, in France, Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour). Speaking of the Anthropocene, Timothy Clark remarked in 2015 in Ecocriticism on the Edge that the new era challenges and resists representation on the kind of scales on which politics and art traditionally operate. As a consequence, late twentieth-century art commentary and history have regularly engaged with issues of ecology, responsibility, and representation at the global level, spawning studies that have tended to steer clear of the national. Sophie Mesplède, who is a specialist of 18th century British art, and Charlotte Gould, who specializes in 20th and 21st British art, have worked together and alongside a host of eminent international colleagues to retrieve the local in their ecocritical approach of British art.

An edited volume published in 2021, British Art and the Environment, Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution, asserts that it is possible to summon the national as an alternative scale to the global, especially by being attentive to Britain’s idiosyncratic perception of its own position in, and possession of the world. The book looked at how art has been made and commented upon from within the geographical boundaries of the historical heartland of the Anthropocene, or, of its more political designation, the Anglocene. Because British artists were the first to professionally experience the effects of a changing environment when they painted views transformed by air pollution and eroded landscapes, while also inaugurating the connectedness between the global and the very particular as their country was extending its hold on the world, Mesplède and Gould have more recently wished to propose for consideration the idea of an “Angloseen”, namely a synthesis of the geological context of the anglocene and of the new modes of attention it requires, therefore allowing for a national approach of the question which nonetheless adopts the full range of scales from the regional to that of a colonised planet. This concept was deployed again this year in a chapter they co-wrote for Methods for Ecocritical Art History (Andrew Patrizio and Olga Smith eds, Manchester University Press, 2026) entitled "A view from Hampstead Heath: making the case for an ‘Angloseen’".

Their talk during this OAB seminar will discuss how the term serves not simply as a descriptor but as a critical tool meant to unpack, critique and, at times, expose Britain’s visual strategies. Their demonstration will focus more specifically on Hampstead Heath (the North London park whose wild features were originally designed to provide a respite from the fog and smoke of industrial London) as both subject-matter for British artists old and new, and embodiment of Britain’s visual naturalisation of the roots of today’s environmental troubles.