Perception, Feeling, Meaning

Reviews / Votes

"This erudite study of the European Enlightenment in nineteenth-century Tasmania combines a big-picture account of the influence of mainly German science, philosophy and art on three colonial artists from the second half of the nineteenth century, two of whom were trained in the German Romantic tradition. Arguing that their art provides a window on how the colony imagined its sense of being, the authors demonstrate how an Enlightenment cosmology made the most distant places into its image and that the most revealing art historiography has been interdisciplinary." (Professor Ian McLean, Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, the University of Melbourne)

"Perception, Feeling and Meaning is not simply a story of landscape painters and their work. It is the story of a way of perceiving and feeling-of how inherited visual grammars and techniques travelled through imperial networks, along treacherous remote shores, under big skies, toward hazy horizons; and of how they helped shape colonial imaginations. It is a story of unfolding spaces, deep time, geological sublimes, but it is also a tale of felled forests, plundered mines, diverted rivers, silted lakes, scientific measurements, expanding telegraph lines, mechanics' institutes, botanical collections, and dispossessed Aboriginal communities. It is a tale of wonder and extraction, of awe and erasure. Under Hutch and Stratford's trained eyes, the canvass comes alive. It transforms into a field of encounter between intellectual traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, and lived experiences. Meaning, we learn, is not detached from feeling-and perceptual habits have both a history and a geography." (Veronica della Dora, Royal Holloway, University of London, author of "The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor")