Landscape 1776 - 1808

Samuel Shelley created this small landscape drawing with pen and watercolor, sometime around the late 18th century. It's a scene dominated by soft blues and greens, with a starkly outlined black frame that flattens the pictorial space. A hill rises towards the right, crowned by a tree whose leaves are suggested by looping lines. The landscape is composed of simple shapes: a rounded hill, a somewhat amorphous tree, and a softly graded sky. Shelley destabilizes conventional landscape painting with this simplified form. The use of line is particularly striking. Shelley employs it to define the forms, but also as a textural element, as we can see with the scratchy lines depicting the foliage. This creates a tension between representation and abstraction, echoing philosophical ideas about the nature of perception and representation. The drawing challenges us to reconsider how we construct meaning from visual signs.