Rare Book School Lecture: Aquatint Travel Books and the Haptic Picturesque

When London viewers opened elegant folio books like Oriental Scenery or The Costume of China they were not just engaging with visual and cultural difference. They were also seeing an image process that was quite familiar. Polite interest in picturesque sketching meant that many Britons had experience drawing outlines, “dead coloring” shadows, and adding enlivening watercolor touches. This three-stage process also occurred in aquatint printmaking; a finely etched outline was made, broad washes of tone were added, and then strategic watercolor flourishes completed the print. Douglas Fordham (Professor of Art History and Chair, Department of Art, University of Virginia) frames that familiarity as the “haptic picturesque,” which surely sounds like an oxymoron for those who think of the picturesque as a purely visual encounter. Aquatint travel books, which were at their height between 1780 and 1830, took the familiar process of “tinted drawings” to distant lands. These luxury books enabled metropolitan viewers to imagine themselves sketching an Indian market or a Chinese temple. They constructed an empire of imaginative projections. As a term, the haptic picturesque unsettles rigid categories between periphery and center, and it suggests that landscapes of sense and sensibility were also landscapes of tactile sensation.

This lecture is also available by Zoom livestream.