Looking Close and Seeing Far
Subtitle: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: January 31, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780271029825
Subjects: Drawing & drawings; History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900; Individual artists; Nature in art, still life, landscapes & seascapes; Painting & paintings; Individual Artist; Subjects & Themes - General; Art; Art & Art Instruction
Description: "Picking up where Lewis and Clark had left off, the Long Expedition of 1819-20 was the first federally sponsored exploratory expedition that was accompanied by professional artists. Under the command of Major Stephen Harriman Long, artists Samuel Seymour, a Philadelphia landscape painter, and Titian Ramsay Peale, a natural historian and the son of artist-scientist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale, together produced more than four hundred drawings and paintings capturing the journey that extended up the Missouri River and through vast stretches of the Louisiana territory. Their work introduced American viewers to the landscapes, wildlife, and Native American inhabitants of the far West. Though widely publicized after the artists' return to Philadelphia, the works were gradually dispersed." "This book unites the core body of extant paintings and drawings, providing a detailed account of the expedition through close visual readings that reveal Seymour's and Peale's complex and unique responses to the contradictory goals of their assignment. Such work is argued to have greatly influenced future artistic expression in the genres of landscape, ethnographic portraiture, and scientific illustration."--book jacket.