Maggie Cao

My dissertation explores the role of the animal as a figure of intervention in the American landscape tradition. I focus on the understudied decline in the national landscape art, which, embodied in large-scale paintings by Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, reached its height in the mid-nineteenth century. I propose that the moment of landscape’s decline can best be illuminated through the study of a new kind of body that became intertwined with landscape production: the animal. I have identified several artists, namely Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Eadweard Muybridge, and Abbott Handerson Thayer, for whom the animal became a new and crucial “figure in the landscape.” In sustained projects by each of these artists, the animal served to express doubt about landscape art’s nationalist claims and the pictorial conventions underlying those claims, thereby opening that genre to modernist possibilities in unexpected ways. In studying the work of these artists in the context of popular science at the end of the nineteenth century, I turn away from anthropomorphic interpretations of animals in art. Instead, I attend to the represented animals’ pictorial functions as “interrupting” figures and as modernist tools for constructing non-allegorical space. Utilizing animal studies theory, my work attempts to address the reasons for the emergence of this new form of non-human agency. I aim to understand why the animal subject in this period became crucial for rethinking landscape art and a new site for negotiating artistic modernity.