WINNER: Historians of British Art Book Prize 2025 - Embroidering the Landscape
The Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee has announced the Book Award winners for publications produced in the 2023 calendar year:
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600–1800 goes to Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770, published by Lund Humphries.
The judges' comments:
Andrea Pappas’s Embroidering the Landscape is a work of serious intellectual ambition. Not content to foreground embroidered needlework as subject of intensive art-historical inquiry, Pappas excavates women’s contributions to an expanded vision of pictorial art. Written with lucid, critical acuity, Embroidering the Landscape troubles received views in which embroidered landscapes embody “naïve” visions. Instead, the book demonstrates how these understudied works were made by worldly women actively combining representational systems and spatial projections encountered in European precedents, Asian export ware, and first-hand experience. Working up from the archive to theorize scalar hierarchies and the “telescopic perspective” incorporated into embroidered pictorial logics, Pappas places needleworks and their makers in an Atlantic world of imperial inequality, land spoliation, and colonialism’s devastating ecological consequences. Embroidering the Landscape is a timely contribution that will find readership in environmental history, women’s studies, and histories of science, among other fields.
About the author:
Andrea Pappas has published on a wide variety of topics in American art, including Jewish American visual culture, women art dealers, and 20th century U.S. art. Her work has twice been supported by the NEH. A new essay, “Tragedy and Timeliness: Finding a Path to a New Art” in Revisiting the Rothko Chapel, edited by Aaron Rosen and Annie Cohen-Solal, is forthcoming in 2025. Awards for her scholarship include the Leo Wasserman Foundation Best Article Prize for “The Picture at Menorah Journal: Making ‘Jewish Art’” published in the Journal of American Jewish History in 2002; the 2016 Robert C. Smith Award from The Decorative Arts Society for “‘Each Wise Nymph that Angles for a Heart’: The Politics of Courtship in the Boston ‘Fishing Lady’ Pictures,” which appeared in Winterthur Portfolio; and the 2024 Charles F. Montgomery Award, also from the Decorative Arts Society, for her recent book, Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770.