Britain’s Imperial Prospects and the Aesthetic Origins of the Scenographia Americana

Abstract

This project investigates the connection between the 18th-century British landscape tradition and the representation of colonial contexts in the Americas, especially the way foreign sites were rendered to seem aesthetically familiar and spatially contiguous with Britain. The project’s organization is based on the Scenographia Americana (1768), a folio of twenty-eight engravings that brought into view the expanding landscape of Britain’s transatlantic frontier in a period marked by the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763). Projecting a cohesive view in preparation for war over territory was of utmost importance, and the Scenographia Americana accordingly brought together “Drawings taken on the spot by several Officers of the British Navy and Army.” Their ranks included a cohort of statesmen, royal military engineers, political thinkers as well as artists, draftsmen, and printmakers; the topographical records, field notes, tactical descriptions, and picturesque scenes they contributed to the project produced nothing less than Britain’s first coherent prospect of the North American landscape and the Caribbean. A close analysis of these views as well as the technical, artistic, and ideological mechanisms that underlay their composition will reveal the ways in which landscape can serve as a narrative framework for shaping a historical consciousness and materializing the space of empire.