Jardin et paysage en Angleterre, 1700-1800 : création et représentation by Frédéric OGÉE – Caen (France)
Gardens and landscapes in England, 1700-1800: creation and representation
Motivated by a new conception of nature and inspired by the design of the landscaped garden, the first players of the English School of painting that emerged during the 18th century gradually instrumentalised landscape art to serve the accurate representation of nature, recognisable and resolutely British. According to them, the modern artist’s task was to represent nature as it is, and no longer as it should be (Arcadia) or how it once was (Paradise Lost). British landscape artists paved the way towards aesthetic categories, adding Beauty to the categories of Sublime and Picturesque, hence enabling a great diversity of ‘natural feelings’ to emerge, and a quest for truth on nature. Richard Wilson (1714-1782) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), each in their own way, proposed the very first authentically British scenes, drawing attention to the remarkable potential of their artistic genre.
Frédéric Ogée
Frédéric Ogée is a professor in literature and history of British art at the University of Paris Cité and the Ecole du Louvre, where he lectures on the English School of painting (for the period 2023-2026). His key research topics are aesthetics, literature and art during and around the 18th century (1660-1850) in the United Kingdom. He has given a number of conferences on these subjects in universities throughout Europe, the United States and Asia. Commissioner of the exhibition on the English artist William Hogarth at the Louvre in 2006, he is also the author of several books, in particular Diderot and European Culture, a collection of essays (Oxford: 2006, new edition 2009), J M W Turner: Les paysages absolus (Hazan, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019), following a conference organised at the European Institute of Gardens and Landscapes. He is currently writing a series of major monographs in French on British artists for the publishers Cohen & Cohen. The first, Thomas Lawrence-Le génie du portrait anglais, was published in December 2022. The following works will focus on J M W Turner (early 2025), Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth. From 2014 to 2017, he was a member of the Tate Britain scientific committee in London and, from 2014 to 2022, acted as a member of the Paris City Council scientific committee. In 2018-2019, he was invited by the Clark Art Institute and the Smith College in Massachusetts, United States. In the spring of 2024, he was an invited speaker for a week at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, and, in June 2024, at the Beijing Normal University in Beijing, two sites he will return to in 2025, a year which will also mark interventions at the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the University of Strasbourg.