Art History Speaker Series

Hunting, Ecology, and the Arts

The 2025-2026 series explores the intersections of hunting, ecology, and the arts. Hunting has long occupied a central place in art history—not only in natural history illustrations, grand paintings of human–animal combat, popular prints, and other visual media, but also as the impetus for a wide range of material culture. It produced artifacts as varied as hunting horns, trophies, horse tack, taxidermy, furniture, and fashion. As both a subject of artistic representation and a material practice, hunting offers a compelling lens through which to consider how human intervention shaped attitudes toward the environment, constructed gender roles, and reinforced social hierarchies. Images of the hunt—often defined by direct and violent incursions into nature—came to embody humanity’s presumed dominion over the natural world.

To examine these works critically is to gain insight into the historical entanglement of humans and their environment, and into the role of that relationship in shaping cultural and historical identities.