Sound is an innate part of every landscape, but scholars of landscape painting have barely considered the potential or significance of sound. My project explores the implied soundscapes of eighteenth-century British and colonial landscape painting, asking how this sonic reading alters our understanding of these images. It is methodologically innovative, engaging with a multi-sensory way of looking that is largely unexplored in both sound studies and art history.

My project offers new means of understanding how landscape operates ideologically in the eighteenth century through the consideration of implied sound. Social and eco-critical art historians have noted the ideological functions operating within landscapes, but have not explored how implied sound might communicate ideas regarding class, race, gender and power within the genre.

My key objective is to explore how implied sound alters perceptions of eighteenth-century British landscapes as ideal and unchanging. To achieve this, I will consider: how implied sound introduces questions of temporality, encouraging the viewer to think what might have come before or after the moment represented in the painting, challenging notions of a static natural landscape; how implied sound can alter an atmosphere of a scene, fundamentally changing a viewer’s response to it, quiet, for example, could be a signal of hostile tension as opposed to peace, challenging the belief of an ideal landscape, and; how implied sound provides a ‘way in’ to an image to a non-specialist audience, increasing public engagement with historical landscapes.