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

Abstract

Picking up where Lewis and Clark had left off, Long Expedition of 1819-20 was first federally sponsored exploratory expedition that was accompanied by professional artists. Under command of Major Stephen Harriman Long, artists Samuel Seymour, a Philadelphia landscape painter, and Titian Ramsay Peale, a natural historian and son of artist-scientist and museum proprietor Charles Willson Peale, together produced more than four hundred drawings and paintings capturing journey that extended up Missouri River and through vast stretches of Louisiana territory. Their work introduced American viewers to landscapes, wildlife, and Native American inhabitants of far West. Though widely publicized after artists' return to Philadelphia, works were gradually dispersed.This book unites core body of extant paintings and drawings, providing a detailed account of expedition through close visual readings that reveal Seymour's and Peale's complex and unique responses to contradictory goals of their assignment. Such work is argued to have greatly influenced future artistic expression in genres of landscape, ethnographic portraiture, and scientific illustration.Though subject matter is linked largely to history of the West, both art and expedition itself were eastern in origin, influence, and institutional affiliation. As leading cultural center of time, Philadelphia gave focus to American interest in understanding world through both scientific and artistic forms of representation. Such a duality, Haltman argues, informed work of Seymour and Peale, who struggled in their art to reconcile conflict between their scientific obligations to mission and their private imaginative and artistic ambitions.

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