Einfühlung and association : landscape painting in nineteenth century Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania

This thesis explores landscape paintings by three artists from different geographic and cultural backgrounds working in Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania: Norwegian Knud Geelmuyden Bull (1811–1889), German Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901), and Tasmanian William Charles Piguenit (1836–1914), all of whom were painters of the natural world as place from c.1850 to c.1900.
The research points to the existence of two contemporaneous philosophies of mind—the association of ideas and the Einfühlung hypothesis. The association of ideas has Platonic and Aristotelian roots and found ardent supporters after being rediscovered by John Locke (1632–1704). Its efficacy was then debated in the British schools of philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Notable in those debates are the Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) by the Reverend Archibald Alison (1757–1839). They synthesise much of his thinking about associationist philosophy, including the idea that the arousal of simple emotions could be recognised by the characteristics that objects exhibit and by simple emotions distilled from sequences of associations emerging from engagements with nature. In turn, the Einfühlung hypothesis was suggested by Giambattista Vico (1668–1774) and elaborated upon by Johan Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). It emerged close to when Alison’s book was published in London. Developed from Herder’s ideas about sich einfühlen—or feeling oneself into—and poorly translated in the early twentieth century as empathy, it remains a way to understand phenomena via sensation and memory.
My work reveals that the association of ideas and the Einfühlung hypothesis require both artists and beholders to draw on what might be conceived of as complex mental and visual encyclopedias and/or dictionaries that employ mnemonics and that function as powerful psychological processes shaping how we understand the world and our place in it. From both philosophies, I have developed a heuristic device that I term enfelt association, which provides a new methodological framework to examine how mnemonics work in the mental processes inherent in executing and beholding landscape paintings. I focus on the formal qualities of landscape painting—line, shape, tone, texture, pattern, colour, and composition—and on the sensorial stimuli and psychological perceptions first signified by landscape painters as tone and mood/atmosphere (hereafter, also described as Stimmung) and subsequently experienced intuitively and emotionally by beholders.
Enfelt association has been deployed throughout the work to explore and explain pan-European understandings about relationships between and among nature, science, metaphysics, and religion that come to light in written records of personal ideologies expounded by leading thinkers. In the process, evidence is presented to show how philosophies of mind developed and were accepted as being truthful and meaningful explanations of reality. I have found most such evidence in landscape paintings themselves, as well as in catalogues of art exhibitions, contemporaneous newspapers, journals of arts and sciences, books in public and private libraries, lectures at mechanics institutes and schools, and letters in and across Europe, and, of course, in Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania. Examination of the evidence has enabled me to establish that landscape painting in this latter place was influenced by the philosophical and aesthetic dispositions of leading thinkers who were also travellers, artists, and naturalists. Four in particular concern me, and their contributions are woven through discussions pertaining to Bull, Guérard, and Piguenit. They are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), John Ruskin (1819–1900), and Charles Darwin (1809–1882). But works produced in the antipodes also “spoke back” to the metropole in unique ways and I suggest that enfelt association is one explanatory framework by which to understand that.
Both analysis of documents and images and the application of enfelt association methodologies to works by Bull, Guérard, and Piguenit thus suggest that the artists’ geographic locations, backgrounds, upbringing, schooling, training, and personal and professional relationships shaped a zeitgeist or genius loci that informed their work. Those labours lead to an idea, transposed to Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania, that the European traditions of form in landscape painting presage unique renditions of nature and place that deeply resonated aesthetically and mentally with colonial beholders. Here, in Ruskin’s terms were creations of Almighty God, or, as Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) would suggest, the World Soul, or, in Carl Gustav Carus’s (1789–1869) estimation, earth-life painting. These ideas of the natural world transmuted via images trigger an in-depth and sustained discussion about how science and philosophy, evolution and creation, or poesis and rationality are argued from different positions and mindsets. The aim of such work is to show in new ways how origination theories affect the production and reception of landscape paintings.
Ultimately, the thesis contributes a new interpretation of what landscape painting is, considered from the psychologically driven actions of a creator engaging in an interlocution with a beholder. This is not a history that references stylistic production or interpretations, and it considers no affiliations with national ideologies. Rather, it a sustained consideration of the mental processes that generate enfeeling and associations between artists, beholders, and the natural world they represent and belong to.
By working with contemporaneous philosophies of mind and closely examining source documents and images I have sought to work outside current narratives of ‘Australian’ art history, give agency to other ways of thinking about and with these images, and consider their effects in new light. This intercession supports ideas of making and meaning from a pan-European perspective. It brings to Australia and specifically, to Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania processes of enfeeling and association with which to engage with artistic traditions and their aesthetic resonances. It also produces a resurrected aesthetic by which one can recognise how a poesis of nature and place might lead to an empathetic concord with the world that sustains us.