Science and the perception of nature

by Charlotte Klonk

This striking and innovative book opens up a new route into the study of British landscape art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each chapter discusses an area in which art and science came into contact with one another: the role played by assumptions drawn from physiology in conditioning eighteenth-century aesthetic debates; Robert J. Thornton's grandly conceived book of botanical illustrations, The Temple of Flora; the interaction between artists and geologists in the exploration of the Scottish landscape; the influence of the artist-scientist Cornelius Varley on the circle of artists around his brother, John Varley, pioneers in the use of open-air sketching. Charlotte Klonk's deeply researched accounts of the complex and often ambiguous interactions that took place between artists and scientists challenge simplistic accounts of developments in art as mere by-products of scientific progress as well as reductive socio-economic interpretations. For Klonk, the commo