Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early AmericaTransporting Visions follows pictures as they traveled through and over the swamps, forests, towns, oceans, and rivers of British America and the United States between 1760 and 1860. Taking seriously the complications involved in moving pictures through the physical worldÑthe sheer bulk and weight of canvases, the delays inherent in long-distance reception, the perpetual threat to the stability and mnemonic capacity of images, the uneasy mingling of artworks with other kinds of things in transitÑJennifer L. Roberts forges a model for a material history of visual communication in early America. Focusing on paintings and prints by John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, and Asher B. DurandÑwhich were designed with mobility in mindÑRoberts shows how an analysis of such imagery opens new perspectives on the most fundamental problems of early American commodity circulation, geographic expansion, and social cohesion. |
Contents
Dilemmas of Delivery in Copleys Atlantic | 13 |
Materiality and Transmission | 69 |
Asher B Durand | 117 |
Material Visual Culture | 161 |
| 201 | |
List of Illustrations | 215 |
Common terms and phrases
actual actual-size aesthetic American Art Ariadne Ariadne’s Art History artist Asher Brown Durand Atlantic Audubon’s birds Audubon’s burden Audubon’s Drawings banknote banknote engraving Birds of America body Boston Tea Party boy’s British Bruno Latour Cambridge colonial communication Copley-Pelham Letters Copley’s Copley’s painting Copley’s tabletop culture Dilemmas of Delivery discourse distance early America eighteenth eighteenth-century example exchange exhibition Flying Squirrel foreground Gallery Henry Pelham history painting illustration John James Audubon John Singleton Copley labyrinth landscape painting line engraving London material Mel Bochner merchant modern Morse Morse’s Museum natural nineteenth century Notes to Pages objects Oil on canvas optical ornamental Ornithological Biography painter painting’s paper Pelham phatic Photograph pictorial portraits produced relationship representation reproduction Robert Havell Jr Samuel F. B. Morse sensory Shark space spatial species studies surface tactile telegraph theory tion transatlantic transit transmission transportation University Press Vanderlyn viewer visual Watson York