Translating the landscape: Eugene Dovilliers and landscape painting in the American South

Translating the landscape: Eugene Dovilliers and landscape painting in the American South Public Deposited

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Creator

Carlisle, Catherine Aiken
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History

Abstract

This thesis examines the practice of early Southern artists who often adapted European stylistic conventions to render Southern subjects and settings. Two landscape paintings by Eugene Dovilliers, a little-known artist working in Columbia, South Carolina, are considered as a case study to demonstrate the various landscape traditions established in Europe that were transposed onto Southern places. First, what is known of Dovilliers's biography is established, providing a rough idea of his whereabouts and activities which helps to determine what might have motivated him to make certain artistic choices. Second, one of Dovilliers's landscape paintings, View of Columbia, c. 1855-1860, is considered as a topographical landscape that harkens back seventeenth-century Dutch landscape traditions. Third, Dovilliers's other landscape painting, Duck Hunting Next to a Grist Mill, c. 1855-1860, recalls the picturesque landscapes of Claude Lorrain and is examined in this thesis using picturesque theory. Finally, the thesis concludes by determining what kinds of meanings might have been invested in Dovilliers's landscapes. Through a close examination of Dovilliers's pair of landscape paintings, this thesis demonstrates how artists working in the antebellum American South translated European artistic conventions into Southern settings.

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