This is a beautifully illustrated, interdisciplinary volume which explores how European and American artists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revealed a compelling interest in dramatic geologic phenomena – caves and natural arches, boulders and rock formations, mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and cliffs. From a topographical, often strata-focused means to a later mode that evoked nature's great transformational powers over time, European and American artists pursued their cross-cultural travels in seeking geological wonders. The authors address the importance and history of geology, the most popular science of the 1800s.
Past Time features a combination of outstanding drawings, watercolours, and brilliant oil sketches and studies, with works by Asher B Durand, Frederic Church, John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, J. M. W. Turner, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Thomas Rowlandson, amongst many others. Past Time is a great addition to the currently available publications on the relationship between the growth of natural science and the interest amongst artists in capturing and presenting scientific phenomena and an ever-changing earth.
Patricia Phagan is the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY. Jill Schneiderman is professor of Earth Science and Associate Chair for Earth Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY.