Kimia Shahi

My research investigates ways of seeing and modes of picturing the ocean and coastlines in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The project brings together works across a range of mediums by Martin Johnson Heade, William Trost Richards, Winslow Homer, Edward Moran, John Frederick Kensett, Fitz Henry Lane, Thomas Eakins, and James McNeill Whistler. I explore how and why these artists devised new approaches to depicting marine and coastal environs, focusing particularly on how they engaged the liminal qualities of littoral landscapes, the fugitive nature of the shoreline, and the scale and materiality of the sea itself. These practices contributed to the marine’s status within a broader cultural imaginary,  at a time when the ocean and coastlines were subject to new and changing forms of scientific inquiry, social formation, and aesthetic appreciation. They also tested and expanded the scope of landscape representation, then a dominant and much-discussed genre in American art and its attendant discourse and institutions.

As discussed in period criticism and literature, pictures of the ocean and coasts were not often identified in words art historians today might use reflexively, such as “landscape” or “seascape.” Rather, they were subject to a varied collection of terms, bespeaking their relative ambiguity as images and as subjects. Yet despite their elusiveness, the margins of land and water, the flux of tides alongshore, and the inscrutable depths and expanse of the sea emerged prominently in art of the mid- to late nineteenth century, serving as especially fertile pictorial terrains for the artists listed above. The works and practices I consider in my research warrant close art-historical attention not just because they portray the ocean and its edges, but also because, in different ways, they identify and engage water as a substance, terrain, and medium that facilitated changing ideas about the act, and stakes, of picturing the natural world and its processes.