Documents of Ignorance: Frederik von Scholten’s Plantation Picturesque and the Domestication of the Historical Landscape of Danish Colonialism in the Caribbean

Beskrivelse

In the 1830s the Danish customs inspector and amateur artist Frederik von Scholten (1796-1853) painted a series of watercolors of plantations and great houses in the Danish West Indies. While these images have a ubiquitous presence in history books on Danish colonialism in the Caribbean, they have received little scrutiny by art historians, including in recent work on “anthropocene landscapes” in Danish art. Yet, Scholten’s works provide an opportunity to address the entangled history of slavery and ecocide in a Danish-Caribbean context, and the role that art has played in the persistent ignorance of this nexus in Denmark. Scholten’s images have similarities to other painters of “plantation picturesque” such as James Hakewill, who merged topographical conventions with a picturesque aesthetic in ways that domesticate the tropical landscape and keep the realities of enslavement at arm’s length. If Hakewill’s prints functioned as “documents of denial” (Vlach 2002) in debates on slavery and abolition in Great Britain in the 1820s, I suggest that Scholten’s images perform a similar task in the memory politics of colonialism, slavery, and ecocide in Denmark today. Scholten’s watercolors never made it to print during his lifetime but started to circulate more than a century later as “neutral” windows to the past in books on colonialism. Analyzing the present-day circulation of Scholten’s images, I argue that the enduring popularity of plantation picturesques speak to the political (after-)effects of colonial visualities and how images can contribute to the ongoing domestication and ruination of the colonial – and historical – landscape.

Periode	17 feb. 2023
Begivenhedstitel	CAA 2023 – College Art Association 111th Annual Conference
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	New York, USA, New YorkVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International