Ecologies of Painting

This special installation, which features some of The Met’s most iconic European paintings, examines how human and nonhuman histories are fundamentally intertwined—and how this fact has been understood over time. Discover how artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Nicolas Poussin explored humanity’s complex relationship with nature. The paintings on view reveal that people cannot exist outside of natural ecosystems but are profoundly interdependent with the rest of the natural world.

Dating from around 1525 to 1775, these paintings trace a shift in European representations of nature from expressions of embeddedness toward assertions of dominance, showing how our conceptions of nature are themselves not “natural” but instead are culturally constructed. The artists’ depictions shape viewers’ experiences of the environments they portray. Overlapping themes include ancient myths that personify natural forces; the relationship between art and science through direct observation of nature; and idealizations of agricultural labor that upheld class, gender, and colonial power structures. As physical objects, paintings alter natural resources like flax, wood, and rare minerals; in turn, these materials continue to have lives of their own.