With a particular focus on Boston Common and similar imagined locations, this project has examined four artifacts between 1750 and 1850. By situating these objects within broader historical phenomena, we are able to track the evolution of human relationships with the natural landscape, material art, and with each other. Each artifact participates in particular social performances through their material composition, visuals, and display; their imagery and materiality were used by their makers and owners to achieve social objectives. With this point in mind, these artifacts simultaneously were used for human purposes whilst also influencing human behavior.

Each work of art contains imagery of human relationships with the Boston landscape. When put in dialogue with one another, it is evident that each artifact draws upon attractive portrayals of the natural landscape to uphold the morals of the city's upper class and exhibit the benefits of gentility. Imagery of benign relationships with the natural landscape were displayed in juxtaposition with a city that was dealing with the heightened repercussions of urban growth. The upper class responded to the poverty and vice that came with industrialization by shaping public conceptions of nature. Modifying the urban landscape to adhere to genteel moral values involved an ideological conception of nature as a distinct entity that offered cultural and social advantages for humans. Thus, the transformation of Boston Common was tied to a larger ideological shift as access to recreational parks prevailed as an elitist political ambition in the 19th century. 

These artifacts demonstrate that people developed new ideas about the landscape as the city grew, eventually viewing it as a distinct entity with its own moral values by the mid 19th century. This is a sharp departure from the intertwined portrayal of the inhabited world and natural world in the mid 18th century. Because of this shift, it is evident that genteel relationships with nature drew from differing environmental philosophies and thus embraced new defining characteristics. In sum, Boston Common and the image of Boston Common transformed to meet the demands of a modified conception of refinement.