In her debut monograph, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, Kelly Presutti examines how landscape was integral to the development of French identity in the nineteenth century. At the heart of the book lies a paradox that Presutti explores: “despite numerous claims locating both abstract nationhood and individual rights in the land, for much of the nineteenth century, it was not clear what that land looked like or even how a national landscape was meant to appear” (1). Each chapter takes up a specific landscape type—mountains, coasts, forests, wetlands—chosen because they “were the subject of frequent representational attention, ongoing political debate, and engineering interventions” (15). The majority of the examples discussed by Presutti consist of paintings, drawings and prints, and photographs. However, there are also some instances of material culture, primarily in the form of services produced by the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres. These examples are evaluated not only for their aesthetic value but also for the functions they frequently performed as part of the nation-building exercise. Presutti argues that, while France did not find a single landscape to align itself with, those in power successfully established systems of land management and land policy that turned land into a multifaceted and vital entity, its form and definition in continuous flux.

The first chapter reveals the ambiguity of mountains, from the changing definition of what can be classified as a mountain to the troubled attempts to delineate the borders of France using the geological form as a marker. Presutti frames it as a problem related to vision, as even when mountains were perceived, they were not fully comprehended, nor could they typically be confined to a neatly material form, as works such as Eugène Violet-le-Duc’s Mont Blanc Seen from the Massif (1874) demonstrate. By depicting mountains as something stable, artists revealed the folly in the narrative of a naturally occurring border. Presutti points to further irony in such thinking by noting that if boundaries are geological features, then they need to be maintained to ensure they retain this political function. The introduction of teleiconography and later photography allowed for a new approach to representing mountains, shifting attention away from their entirety to focus more on their peaks and the strength and danger involved in conquering them.

Although the second chapter centers on coasts and is thus closely connected to the seemingly ever-moving element of water, the theme of faux rigidity continues from the previous chapter. The guiding question for Presutti is the same question that vexed the French government at the time: “how could the coasts be pictured in a way that balanced the expansive potential of the sea with the definitude of a particular location?” (63). Hence, marine painting is the primary focus of chapter two. Presutti reminds her reader that the term “marine” holds multiple meanings in French, referring to the sea itself but also the naval and trade contexts that occur on its watery surface. Joseph Vernet’s series Les vues des ports de France (1754-65) makes an expected appearance for the precedent it sets when it comes to expanding the language used to talk about the sea. Presutti points to Louis Garney as the Restoration’s foremost maritime painter at a time when there was little enthusiasm for marine painting as Britain dominated the seas. Garney’s work shifts the focus from ports to coasts, from the veneer of national glory to a heightened geographic accuracy, resulting in a series of prints as well as a Sèvres service. The architecture of Paris and the creation of the Musée de la Marine in 1827 are used by Presutti to demonstrate how concerns with France’s diminishing maritime identity were not confined to the pictorial surface. It is only at the very end of the chapter that Presutti challenges the currently established connection between Impressionism and the sea as being primarily about fluidity, arguing instead that the core function of naval painting was consolidating, claiming, and establishing borders.

Chapter three shifts attention to France’s interior by opening with Théodore Rousseau’s Forest in Winter at Sunset (ca. 1846-67). A leading member of the Barbizon school, Rousseau supports Presutti’s argument that the myth of the perfect forest, idyllic in its savagery, was promoted by artists and picked up by the government for their own purposes. The forest captured at once the potential of industrial wealth and the fear that an unruly lower class would destroy these resources. This conception of the forest began on the level of language, as Presutti notes the difference between forêt and bois. The depiction of forests always involved a degree of mapping, which meant that the formulation of the forest in its entirety was regularly balanced by the practical dimension that is forest management. Remarkably, artists like Paul Laurent taught drawing to forestry students, developing techniques that allowed foresters to remain in their offices without having to venture out and observe the actual trees. When producing a guidebook for Fontainebleau Forest, the stomping grounds of the Barbizon school, Claude-François Denecourt mapped existing walking paths and later created new paths on the page and in the physical forest, turning the site from a resource into a tourist attraction. Returning to Rousseau, Presutti’s readings of his paintings are not confined to the poetics of trees. In his work, Presutti finds the struggle to visually codify the forest as a landform, much like the case with mountains in the first chapter. The forest is shown to be a social space, navigated by humans and animals alike, a space that was used and protected by artists in the service of the government as much as for their own personal profit.

The theme of human-land relations continues into chapter four, which focuses on wetlands, the physical appearance of which makes it easy to “de-specify the specific places” (150). Presutti works with the myth of wetlands as empty and unproductive to highlight how images were used to define the geographical and social character of the region. For instance, Presutti draws attention to the way the locals of the Landes region were conceived as eccentric, in large part due to their continued use of stilts to navigate the terrain. Physiognomy was also used to further paint the Landais as less-than-human. Landes, Presutti argues, is a case of internal colonization, a project that was achieved, once again, through land management. Works like the 1853 atlas Success in the drainage of swamps turned to the rhetoric of function to order the wetlands, create purpose, indicate available resources, and convey the presence of hidden value. Artists like Rousseau and Jules Duré created work in part to make the wetlands comprehensive for a Parisian audience, which involved arguing that there was something worth seeing in the region, something of aesthetic value. By contrast, photographs by figures like Félix Arnaudin provided a more somber view of the Landes landscape, since they were less likely to be polished and constructed like paintings. In Arnaudin’s case specifically, Presutti sees a form of emptiness that is “not alienating but dazzling” (179), where precision, such as counting the number of steps taken to reach a specific spot, became a sign of embodied presence on and with the land.

Land Into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France is a vital addition to the growing material turn in art history. The discussion of environmental materiality is present in three notable examples in the book. In chapter three, Presutti discusses Rousseau’s addition of the unstable bitumen, a petroleum-based hydrocarbon, to his pigments, which causes his painted forests to degrade into the kind of muddy brown associated with the bitumen and “align[s] his canvas with the contingency of the woods, consciously or not” (131). A vase by Émile Gallé made to resemble a pinecone and touching on the interconnection of empire, forestry management, and national identity, closes out the chapter as Presutti notes the paradox of using glass to make an object that laments the loss of forests, given that the medium contributes to deforestation through its production method. Resin performs a similar role in bridging the material and the iconographic in chapter four, used to render the wetlands of the Landes region while being extracted from the very pines grown there. As Presutti points out, pines were quick to burn and became a mode of resistance that locals enacted upon the government in a paradoxical meeting of the elements. Land Into Landscape fills a scholarly gap with what is a critical interrogation of the French landscape tradition reminiscent of the work of scholars like Ann Bermingham, Kay Dian Kriz, and Jill Casid in the British context. Presutti reveals the depth of visual, social, and environmental analysis that lies in representations of land and water while also reminding readers that neither space is ever neutral.