Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823

Picking up where Lewis and Clark had left off, the Long Expedition of 181920 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.

Kenneth Haltman is the H. Russell Pitman Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma. He is co-editor ofAmerican Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (2000), translator and editor of major works by French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, and, most recently, a contributor toNexus of Exchange: Philadelphia and the Visual Culture of Natural History, 1740 to 1840, edited by Amy R. W. Meyers (forthcoming).