Research Catalog

Title

Looking close and seeing far : Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823 / Kenneth Haltman.

Author

Haltman, Kenneth, 1957-

Publication

University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxv, 278 p. : ill. (some col.), maps; 27 cm.

Summary

"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.

Subject

• Peale, Titian Ramsay, 1799-1885 > Criticism and interpretation
• Seymour, Samuel, active 1797-1822 > Criticism and interpretation
• Stephen H. Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1819-1820)
• West (U.S.) > In art

Genre/Form

• Art
• Art.
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-269) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: Figures in a Western Landscape -- Samuel Seymour: Science and Imagination -- Managing Distance -- The Poetics of Geologic Reverie -- The Dream of Ethnological Connection -- Titian Ramsay Peale: Science and Selfhood -- Managing Nature -- The Art of Predatory Looking -- Natural History as Family History -- Conclusion: Looking Close and Seeing Far. dia

ISBN

• 027102982X (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9780271029825 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9780271029823 (cloth : alk. paper) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2007014903

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library