Voyages dans les Alpes. Partie pittoresque... 1834

Curator: This print, titled "Voyages dans les Alpes. Partie pittoresque…," hails from 1834 and provides us with a glimpse into the world as seen by Horace Bénédict de Saussure. The piece currently resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: Whoa, a pre-Instagram travel snapshot! Seriously though, that’s a powerful mountain range looming over everything. It kind of swallows the little village nestled beneath it. Makes you feel small, doesn’t it? Curator: Absolutely. The landscape is rendered through a very particular lens, of course. The houses, the road—they all seem placed in service to that sublime mountain view. The pursuit of the sublime during this time was very much intertwined with class, race, and power, dictating who had the luxury, literally and figuratively, to pursue such experiences. Editor: Yeah, I get that. It's like nature is this grand spectacle, and the people and the village are just props in the play. I am wondering who has the privilege to contemplate the landscape. Who lives there and is maybe annoyed about tourists on the road to see it everyday? It's so… ordered, you know? Everything's got its place. Curator: Precisely. Even the placement of the church, right in the foreground, reinforces this hierarchy, doesn't it? The visual narrative emphasizes a specific perspective on nature, one that romanticizes and perhaps even sanitizes the experience. The way that landscape has been depicted by white wealthy people over history has deep colonialist and capitalist implications in history that are always useful to think about. Editor: Sanitizes, yeah, that’s a good word for it. Almost like a snow globe version of reality. I wonder if Horace ever just tripped on a cow pie and cursed the Alps. Probably not if he felt entitled to it, right? I like the balance between light and dark shades that create the composition overall though! Curator: He certainly wasn’t roughing it like the people who called that valley home, that’s for sure. The perspective invites the viewer to passively consume this idealized view of nature without reckoning with its challenges, erasures, and exclusions. Editor: It makes me wonder about my own perceptions too. Thanks for shaking my snow globe! Curator: Indeed, recognizing the historical lens is a crucial part of how we understand our engagement with art and the wider world around us.