I wrote about staffage in vues d’optique—a genre of etching popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—for a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum. I first encountered these prints during my research fellowship in Leiden and was struck to learn that, around the same time, the Johnson received a donation of a set of vues d’optique depicting New York City (their first of the kind). The longer essay I prepared compares vues of port cities—Batavia, Manila, Shanghai, Canton, Constantinople, Amsterdam, and others. While I try to keep my essays readable, I remain deeply drawn to the technical vocabulary art historians have used to describe highly specific pictorial elements.

Read the article here:

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/02/museum-installation-focuses-small-figures-large-landscapes