Art, Agriculture and Colonialism: Revisiting Nineteenth-Century Danish Landscape Painting in Museums

In recent times, thinkers from formerly colonized regions have increasingly argued that empires have employed agriculture as a tool of colonization. Amitav Ghosh, an Indian writer and social anthropologist, has argued that Europeans have been shaping the world through terraforming that included agriculture, and Indian farmer and writer Vandana Shiva has connected monocultures to colonialism. Concurrently, the United Nations has emphasized the correlation between our land cultivation practices and the climate and biodiversity crises. This chapter examines how nineteenth-century landscape paintings in the collection of the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK, National Gallery of Denmark) have shaped and still shape perspectives on agriculture to explore the complex dynamics between colonial practices and environmental consequences.