The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a profound transformation of the economic system of Western Europe and its colonial territories. Economic prosperity was fostered by scientifically informed modes of resource management that promoted an extractive, that is, a "resource-depleting model for using raw materials" (13). These unprecedented developments paved the way for industrial modernity. While social histories of European art have already studied various aspects of this period's reorganization of political economy, O'Rourke places human engagement with the environment at the center of her analysis (5). Her book does not primarily investigate the artistic genre of landscape, despite its significant reevaluation between 1780-1850. Rather, she adopts a broader concept of environment, allowing her to trace visual strategies across media ranging from painting to technical diagrams, illustrations, and maps (4). Each of the four chapters is devoted to a distinct "natural resource" subjected to an extractive economy: timber, ore, wastewater, and living organisms.

For O'Rourke, artistic landscapes present only one among many ways of modeling human relations to the "natural world". This methodological flattening enables her to "delineate an alliance between the operations of landscape and the operations of extraction" (3). Her claim is that pictorial or visual "operations" are not inherent to particular artistic genres or media, but instead participate in larger "interlocking" networks of practices and protocols - or infrastructures. O'Rourke defines modern European "infrastructure" as "the widespread presence of interacting physical systems for managing the circulation of commodities, natural resources, people, information, and economic value." (115) Within these systems, visual culture generally serves to facilitate forms of extractive thinking and only rarely obstructs them. The mutually reinforcing relationship between visual and economic practices frequently entrenches violent social hierarchies.

O'Rourke repeatedly returns to the claim that the "human vantage point" was epistemologically decentered around 1800 due to the expansion of extractive economies (e.g. 69 or 97f). Scientific images and technical diagrams were instrumental in rendering legible the vast spatial and temporal dimensions of modern infrastructures. These visual forms do not mimic first-person experience but instead visualize what lies beyond the capabilities of human perception - such as a forest map or a cross-section of rock strata. O'Rourke compellingly argues that this decentering of ordinary sight posed a genuine challenge for landscape painting, which had been anchored in the logic of the human vantage point for generations. The discussion might, at times, have benefited from a fuller consideration of this distinctive quality of painting and its potential to resist the demands of extractive modernity. The book's infrastructural perspective occasionally downplays medium-specific distinctions, emphasizing the shared participation of artworks and technical diagrams in the visual logics of extraction.

In the first chapter, O'Rourke argues that illustrations of French forest management and some landscape paintings facilitated the visual and epistemic operation of "unbundling". Artists treated certain parts of the environment, such as individual trees, "as distinct or separable from the landscape in which they are embedded, enabling their subsequent extraction." (30) Whereas some French painters encouraged the viewer's gaze to move through the forest landscape and selectively "pick out" trees, others instead rendered the forest as an inseparable thicket, thereby obstructing the logic of extraction (35-44).

The second chapter examines the spatial reorientation from horizontal expansion to vertical mining in the German Harz Mountains. The "vertical transit" through the closed-pit mine shaft shaped a "vertical consciousness" within geologically minded circles of German Romanticism (82). O'Rourke also tentatively proposes that this verticality "supplanted the horizon line as the primary device through which the human orients themselves within a mineral landscape." (83) This orientational shift, she boldly suggests, may have contributed to the change from the horizontal (so-called landscape) format to the upright (so-called portrait) format exemplified, among other works, in Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer.

The third chapter focuses on the work of the British painter John Martin, who also devoted considerable effort to engineering plans concerning mining safety as well as the regulation of London's water supply and sewage drainage. Large-scale wastewater disposal presents a kind of inverse "resource" within extractive infrastructure (102). O'Rourke convincingly argues that Martin's monumental paintings of biblical catastrophes address anxieties surrounding the management of imperial infrastructures on a global scale (132). Martin regularly supplied viewers with descriptive pamphlets containing a numbered diagram of the picture and an accompanying key, guiding interpretation where the overwhelming scale of the depicted landscape threatened to exceed the beholder's visual comprehension - reenacting the threat of civilizational collapse (113f).

In the final chapter O'Rourke returns to the French colonial network, where naturalists investigated the relationship between an individual "organism" and the material conditions of its "milieu" (138f). Two competing approaches in comparative anatomy tended to either emphasize acclimatization or to insist upon separability; both proved useful within infrastructures dedicated to the extraction of high-value crops or the exploitation of enslaved people (140). O'Rourke argues that the pictorial relation between figure and ground is informed by naturalist conceptions of the relationship between organism and environment. For example, the face and chest of the pleading figure of Greece in Eugène Delacroix's La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi appear white, while her extremities acquire the darker tones of the background occupied by Ottoman forces (165-167).

O'Rourke's book Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction is an elegantly written and intellectually ambitious study. Integrating art historical research with broader concerns of environmental humanities and social history, it offers a rare and timely look at the economic and social conditions that shaped art and visual culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While O'Rourke's infrastructural perspective occasionally tends to flatten media-specific distinctions between artistic forms and technical images, the book nevertheless advances a highly compelling account of the emergence of extractive ways of seeing, thereby laying the groundwork for future studies.

Simon Lindner