Description
Book SynopsisUnites the core body of paintings and drawings, providing an account of the expedition through close visual readings that reveal Samuel Seymour's and Titian Ramsay Peale's complex responses to the contradictory goals of their assignment.
Trade Review“It is difficult to imagine a more learned account of this material. Looking Close and Seeing Far is a signal contribution to studies of American Romanticism—a lucid, exemplary account of the richness of an art of not-knowledge, of an art about failings and strivings to know a place (the American West) as much as that place itself.”
—Alexander Nemerov,Yale University
“University of Oklahoma art historian Kenneth Haltman has collected the surviving images and skillfully weaves a tale of science and art, of eastern sensibilities and western wonders, in this exhaustively researched volume.”
—Bloomsbury Review
“Looking Close and Seeing Far deepens and complicates our understanding of the art of the western surveys and the relationship between art and science in the early national period. My major concern about this eloquent and beautifully produced book is that because it addresses lesser-known artists, working in less-valued media, in a little-studied period, it will not be as widely read as it deserves to be.”
—Rebecca Bedell CAA Reviews
“Haltman (Univ. of Oklahoma) offers a meticulously researched, carefully written, handsomely illustrated, and perceptively argued study that examines in particular the unique contributions of Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale in providing both a visual record and artistic impression of the topography, geology, flora, fauna, and Native peoples encountered.
Haltman carefully examines their paintings and drawings to understand the cultural, artistic, and intellectual context in which they were created and the artistic conventions and symbolism that they followed or abandoned. The detailed notes, comprehensive bibliography, and attractive, appropriate plates further add to the value of this work.”
—P. D. Thomas Choice
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
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
Notes
Bibliography
Index
