OSU study blends art and science to learn about past landscapes

When you look at a painting in a gallery or museum, you can’t always tell how much of what’s portrayed is accurate or how much artistic license has been taken. But a new study from Oregon State University shows that some 19th-century landscape paintings are accurate enough to aid scientists who are researching historical forest systems.

Dana Warren is an associate professor of forestry at OSU. Peter Betjemann is an English professor and the Patricia Valian Reser Executive Director of Arts and Education. They collaborated on the study, and join us with more details on how art and science can serve each other.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. When you look at a painting in a gallery or a museum, you can’t always tell how much is accurate and how much is the product of artistic license. A new study from Oregon State University shows that some 19th-century landscape paintings are accurate enough to aid scientists who are researching historical forest systems. Dana Warren is an associate professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. Peter Betjemann is an English professor and the Patricia Valian Reser Executive Director of Arts and Education. They collaborated on this study and they join us now with more details on how art and science can talk to each other. Welcome to the show.

Dana Warren: Thanks.

Peter Betjemann: Thanks so much.

Miller: Peter Betjemann, first. I understand that this collaboration happened, it seems at least starting by chance. How did the two of you first get talking about art and historical ecology?

Betjemann: I met Dana because our kids were in preschool together and I do sort of think that trans-disciplinary work often has a lot of moments of chance that drive a particular collaboration, and this is a great example of that. And just in the course of chit chat, Dana was telling me about his interest in historical ecology. I needed him to define the parameters of what that even meant. And he mentioned to me that he had always imagined that paintings or sketches could be a potential tool for historical ecologists, but that these questions of bias, the way in which representation is not photographic in a painting, were always preventing ecologists from drawing on that resource. And I said to him, I remember it very clearly, “well, I think an art historian can help you pick out the pieces that might be of value to you.” And it was in that moment that the collaboration was born. It ended up involving a much larger trans-disciplinary team across multiple institutions and we’ve been at it for a few years now.

Miller: Well, Dana Warren, what was it like to hear that there were experts who could actually help you find the helpful pieces?

Warren: Yeah, it was a very serendipitous moment, as Peter said. It was great. This is an idea I had sort of been churning on since graduate school. And I took it to some senior professors and I kind of pitched it and they said, “Oh, it’s artistic license. You can’t trust it.” So I kind of tucked it in my back pocket. And I definitely distinctly remember Peter saying, it was either that meeting or a subsequent one, “well, if you just do your art history homework, you can absolutely figure out which one you can.”

Miller: It’s like a challenge.

Warren: It was, and then it took us probably five or six years before we actually were able to come together and get the funding from the National Science Foundation to do this work. But yeah, it was a fun moment because it was something that had been gnawing at me for a while and to have Peter be like, oh, I can help you with that.

Miller: Well, but Peter also mentioned a question that I had, which is, what is historical ecology? What is your field of study?

Warren: Well, I wear a number of hats, but the field of historical ecology is essentially trying to understand ecological conditions in the past. And I think a nice sort of salient example for the Willamette Valley is something like historic fire regimes. So, trying to understand how frequently [and of] what severity did fires occur in this region? And that’s really important because it set the stage for the communities that were present or dominated the landscape prior to European expansion into the region. And, sort of understanding those historic conditions, or in the case of our study, it was trying to understand what forests looked like before industrialization developed in the Eastern U.S. And that was interesting and I think important because since industrialization, we’ve lost American Elm [and] American Chestnut from those forests. And so we have potentially information about what these systems look like before those keystone species have been lost.

Miller: So Peter, it’s time for some art history here. “Accuracy” is not always a subject of an artistic movement. How big a role did it play broadly in 19th century landscape painting?

Betjemann: Yeah, that’s a great question. And the answer, in effect, is that in the middle of the 19th century, a movement towards plein air painting really became a dominant feature of painterly practice.

Miller: Plein air painting, meaning on site, painting outside.

Betjemann: Painting on site, taking a stool and an easel out into the forest, literally setting yourself down in front of a scene and either sketching or in some cases painting with oils, what you saw. And prior to this moment, and we’re really talking here about the period between 1820 and 1860, artists were encouraged to make copies of Greco Roman sculptures. Some of the academies in New York maintained extensive collections of reproductions of Greco Roman sculptures for this pedagogical purpose. Or artists were encouraged to sit down in front of paintings by old masters and attempt to faithfully reproduce them.

That all changed actually quite quickly in the 1840s. And there’s some really interesting circumstantial reasons that that happened. One of them was - and Dana loves this example, so I think he’ll be pleased that I’m including it - the invention of the tin paint tube in 1843, which allowed artists to carry premixed peg pigments into the field. Certainly, one of the other factors driving this development, steamship travel for artists based in New York. It was possible to hop on a steamboat and disembark at any number of ports of call, up the Hudson River, one of which was Catskill, New York, offering access to the Catskill Mountains and really majestic scenes in that region. And so all of this kind of comes together to really transform artistic practice in that era.

Miller: You focused on a painter named Asher Durand for this study. Who was he and why was he helpful for this particular inquiry?

Betjemann: This seems like a great moment to demonstrate your art historical chops.

Miller: Can I just interrupt to say the two of you didn’t really know each other before this collaboration. Because it seems like you now have real familiarity.

Warren: We had crossed paths via our kids, as Peter mentioned, but hadn’t really connected or hung out until we started to really get into this.

Miller: So now you’re academic buddies as well.

Warren: Yes. Oh, totally.

Miller: OK. So Dana, back to Asher Durand. What have you learned about him?

Warren: Well, one of the reasons that Asher Durand was particularly good is that the art historical research requires digging into what those individuals thought. And Durand was great because he wrote so much of it down. He was very influential. He was the head of – Peter’s gonna correct me on this - the American School of Design?

Betjemann: National Academy of Design.

Warren: National Academy of Design. And so he was very influential and he was writing at a time when there was this expansion in people’s interest in doing this plein air painting. And so he wrote these letters to a hypothetical student in a periodical called The Crayon, at the time, where he explicitly espoused the importance of painting, true to nature and painting outside. And so those at least provided the basis for us to be able to have some confidence that if he’s espousing the importance of painting close to nature, then we can be fairly confident that at least some of his paintings are actually accurate representations of nature. And so that was really the art history hallmark part that made Duran particularly strong. How’s that Peter?

Betjemann: That was perfect, Dana. And I would just add that in addition to being a proponent of plein air painting, Duran was such an influence on other artists, both through his writing and through his direct mentorship, including Frederick Church, that by beginning with Duran who really launched a movement - which was a choice that we had make to limit this study to sort of one central artist - we felt that it would then be possible for other scholars to attempt the same methodology on his proteges.

Miller: Dana, are there Northwest artists that you can imagine either yourself or other ecologists turning to going forward to help with actual important questions?

Warren: Yes, I mean, I don’t know the names, but certainly, this is what we would love to do…is think especially there are a number of these artists that came from what’s sort of known as the Hudson River School, with a number of them espouse this philosophy of painting close to nature. So, a number of them accompanied expeditions with American expeditions exploring the Louisiana Purchase, which included coming up through the Willamette Valley. And so I think there’s great potential to look at some of those early paintings and people have done that. They’ve certainly done that anecdotally. I’ve seen it in lectures and they’re very compelling pictures of what the Willamette Valley looked like under a different historic fire regime. And what we’re hoping this work that we did does is it gives us a pathway to turn those from anecdotes into more codified data, valuable images that we can really lean on more explicitly.

One of the things that I’ve actually learned from Peter is you really do need to look at each of those individual artists. So I think there is great potential to do that with artists who’ve been painting in the Willamette Valley and across Oregon. There’s a number of paintings of Mount Hood, for example. But when this started, I was like, oh, well, we can just use all the artists from the Hudson River School. And then Peter was like, oh God, no, we can’t even use artists. We need to pick a specific time period, as well as a specific artist that we kind of unpack.

I think there is really great potential and my hope is that this paper that we wrote and the work that we’re doing really inspires other people to go out and start to dig into this, because it’s definitely more than any two people in a collaboration can do.

Miller: Peter, we just have about a minute left, but we’ve been talking about what art can contribute to historical ecology. But what about the reverse?

Betjemann: I love that question, Dave. And the reason I love it is because the corpus of work that we looked at is a corpus that I’ve been looking at for a long time. And I learned to see it completely anew when, just being in these meetings, having to feverishly google terms that my science colleagues were using as they’re talking about bryophyte mats and epiphytes and epicormic rearticulations and then seeing those features in paintings that I had been trained often to see as allegories or as expressions of a kind of cultural zeitgeist or of a particular mood in the New York art community in a given era. To see those in terms of the details that the artists were paying attention to, to hone in detail after detail, just made me realize what incredible observers these artists were. And then it just transformed the paintings for me, permanently.

Miller: Peter Betjemann and Dana Warren, thanks very much.

Warren: Thank you.

Betjemann: Thank you.

Miller: Peter Betjemann is an English professor and the Patricia Valian Reser Executive Director of Arts and Education at Oregon State University. Dana Warren is an associate professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at OSU.

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