Imagining Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Tasmania

This book examines how landscape in nineteenth-century Tasmania was perceived, felt, and made meaningful. Philip Hutch and Elaine Stratford situate Tasmanian landscape within the wider intellectual and artistic currents of the age, bringing together ideas about philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, geography, natural history, and landscape art. They show how habits of perceiving and feeling were shaped by leading thinkers and artists and reveal how these inheritances informed responses to landscape in Tasmania. At the centre of the book are Knud Geelmuyden Bull, Eugene von Guérard, and William Charles Piguenit. Encountering Tasmania transformed them; in turn, their paintings reshaped how beholders perceived, felt into, and interpreted the island’s landscapes. In tracing these reciprocal processes, the book offers an original account of enfeeling and enfelt association as central to processes of mind by which to imagine landscape. It follows from Hutch and Stratford’s first book, Landscape, Association, Empire: Imagining Van Diemen’s Land.