River Landscape with a Waterfall 

James Ward created this pen and ink wash drawing of a river landscape, a popular subject in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Ward was working during a time of great change in England. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape and society, and there was a growing interest in nature as a source of beauty and solace. Ward's detailed focus on the natural world speaks to the aesthetic and philosophical values of the Romantic movement. It represented a shift from the rationalism of the Enlightenment to an emphasis on emotion, imagination, and the sublimity of nature. Here, the cascading waterfall evokes the raw power of nature, an idea which was quite fashionable at the time. But what does it mean to find solace in nature when access to it is so unevenly distributed across lines of class and race? How do we reckon with the fact that for some, nature is a site of leisure and contemplation, while for others, it’s a place of labor, displacement, or even violence? How might this idyllic scene obscure the realities of environmental degradation and social inequality that were also taking place at the time?