This is the fourth post in the Wetland Wednesday series, edited by Gabrielle McLaren

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The negative cultural connotations of wetlands as unproductive, insalubrious, wastelands took on particular urgency in nineteenth-century France, as state officials worked to create a compelling and cohesive national landscape in the wake of the 1789 Revolution. In contrast to “productive” and “beautiful” agricultural lands, wetlands were what some commentators termed a “national problem” requiring infrastructural intervetions akin to, in novelist Edouard About’s terms, the great cathedrals of the past. By the time of the Second Empire, the eradication of a vast swath of wetland in the Southwest known as the “Landes” was legislated and funded by the state. Today, the drained landscape, planted with pines to stabilize the soil, constitutes Europe’s largest artificial forest. 

As an art historian, I look to the ways in which that environmental transformation was negotiated in visual representation. My upcoming book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France positions artworks as an active agents in reconfiguring the meaning and use of land and explores their part in the formation of modern France. The “wetlands” chapter of the book begins with the peculiar suggestion, repeatedly made in the early nineteenth century, that wetlands were “invisible.” Poet Jean-Baptiste La Lanne described the Landes in 1800 as having “nothing” to see:

As I crossed this barren expanse
I searched in vain to animate my view
Stagnant nature, in a mournful rest
Sleeps in a stupor, mute and without echo

Silence and death cover this savage place 
Not a single tree lends its shadow.
You advance into the distance
Nothing offers itself to your eyes. 

Given France’s investment in promoting a visible national landscape, wetlands’ “invisibility” was a motive for their transformation. But in the 1840s, before they were drained, a pair of artists committed to the new practice of painting outdoors (prior landscapes had been idealized fictions conceived in studios) tried to render this nothingness. Upon arriving to the Landes region, Jules Dupré declared it to be “ungraspable.” His companion, Théodore Rousseau, was similarly overwhelmed. Rousseau nevertheless managed to produce a luminous impression of the wetlands’ unique beauty. 

Rousseau’s Swamp in the Landes (pictured above) is a small canvas with an open view across a flooded plain. Silvery white brushstrokes glance over the surface of the image, suggesting its watery, reflective ground. Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal landscape. Rousseau’s canvas allows wetlands’ irresolution, the lack of separation between water and land, to stand. But later in his career, he revised his vision. In the 1850s, after years of rejections from official art circles, Rousseau began to gain some acceptance. His paintings in those years, in turn, rendered a vision of the landscape that was more acceptable to the state. 

“Dragging a thinly loaded brush horizontally in short strokes, the artist evoked the sparse, fleeing sensations of this liminal landscape. “

Rousseau painted the Landes again in 1852, this time relying on more conventional compositional strategies to frame his view. Cows graze in the foreground, overseen by a small figure in a kind of pastoral vignette. Mountains along the horizon give definition to the flat plain through opposition and create a visual border, arresting the gaze and interrupting the vast expanses. A neat plantation of young pines further serves to hold the terrain, and our attention, in place. Watery brushstrokes do not fan across the surface as they did in the earlier painting, but instead gather in discrete pools that neatly reflect the cows above. Rousseau offered a more orderly vision of the landscape in anticipation of its eventual transformation. 

In 1855, Rousseau’s second Swamp in the Landes was shown at France’s Universal Exhibition where it intersected with both the artist’s rising public image and the state’s growing interest in draining the Landes region. In the agricultural portion of the exhibition that year, an engineer named Jules Chambrelent mounted a display of the trunks of pines he had successfully planted in the Landes in 1850, just five years earlier. Demonstrating that the trees thrived in the climate and could grow quickly enough to turn a profit, Chambrelent encouraged the investment of greater capital to “valorize” the Landes’ ground. His work was found to be so “extraordinarily valuable” in the jury’s report that he was not only awarded a first-class medal but also received a special dispensation from the emperor Napoleon III. In serving on the exhibition jury, Napoleon III saw both Rousseau’s painting and Chambrelent’s display, and together they contributed to his interest in the region: in the following years, the emperor purchased and drained over 7,000 hectares of wetland in the Landes region. In 1855, art delivered the landscape the state wanted to see, and this representation was backed by the technological and administrative capacity for reform. Two years later, in 1857, not only had the emperor personally invested in the region, but drainage of the wetlands was mandated by law.

Rousseau did not cause the wetland drainage, but his work does make visible some of the dynamics between historical actors and both real and ideal landscapes that may escape the written record. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was not clear or evident that Landes’ wetlands should be drained; there were efforts to engage with the landscape on its own terms, and there were alternative visions for what the region could look like. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, it was not clear or evident that Landes’ wetlands should be drained; there were efforts to engage with the landscape on its own terms, and there were alternative visions for what the region could look like. 

We see another vision of the Landes in the work of the amateur photographer Félix Arnaudin. Born in Labouheyre in 1844, in the very center of the contested region, Arnaudin mourned the loss of his native environment and tried to capture what he could of it in the new medium of photography. He heavily manipulated his photographs to remove signs of ongoing transformation, including using gouache to white out the pines planted to stabilize the soil but also block the view. The results celebrate the region’s “emptiness,” what Arnaudin termed a “dream of immensity and solitude.”

Arnaudin made thousands of images of the Landes landscape, and yet they all look curiously the same: a horizon line extends midway across the view. Above the line, a washed-out sky. Below, a brushy field that extends without interruption into the distance. Arnaudin had that horizon line inscribed on his camera lens to ensure consistency across his images, and again and again, we see the same expanses of ground and sky, open, uninterrupted plains, devoid of distinguishing marks.

Photographs of Félix Arnaudin, from left to right: Lande, 1876. Unvarnished glass plate collodion negative (image inverted) (9 x 12 cm); Lande, 1876. Unvarnished glass plate collodion negative (image inverted) (9 x 12 cm);  La Mouleyre, de la pointe de Pouchio, 1875. Unvarnished glass plate collodion negative (image inverted) (9 x 12 cm). Photos courtesy of Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

Arnaudin’s oeuvre calls into question our ability to know a place by its picture; it does so at the same time that the state was using visual representation to manage environments at a distance. He offers an implicit resistance to modernity’s totalizing vision and gives us an alternative means of conceiving wetlands. Visual representation tells us not what places look like, but instead reveals how diverse actors and agents were invested in environments in complex, layered, and entangled ways. Artists could both make an “invisible” landscape visible and resist its transformation—as they still can today. 

Kelly Presutti’s book Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France will be coming out with Yale University Press on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.