Looking Close and Seeing Far

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.

Though the subject matter is linked largely to the history of “the West,” both the art and the expedition itself were eastern in origin, influence, and institutional affiliation. As the leading cultural center of the time, Philadelphia gave focus to the American interest in understanding the world through both scientific and artistic forms of representation. Such a duality, Haltman argues, informed the work of Seymour and Peale, who struggled in their art to reconcile the conflict between their scientific obligations to the mission and their private imaginative and artistic ambitions.