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Different Travellers, Different Eyes:
Artists' Narratives of the American West, 1820–1920
Edited by Peter Wild, Donald A. Barclay, and James H. Maguire
The early American West has been depicted in art
as a land of harsh struggles, a place of heavenly
miracles, and everything in between. Different
Travellers, Different Eyes records impressions of
life on the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American
frontier by twenty-one artists better known for their paint-
ings, sculptures, and photographs. Most but not all the
selections come from journals or diaries kept during trips
to the West.
Thomas Moran, for instance, notes what others must have felt,
that "the impression then made upon me by the stupendous and
remarkable manifestations of nature's forces will remain with
me as long as memory lasts." That impression of grandeur echoes
the vast and dramatic canvasses Moran created on his trips west.
Different Travellers, Different Eyes is not an art-history
book. The narrators are not art historians. Their works adorn the
walls of museums, fill the pages of art books, fetch large sums
at auction, and (as reproductions) illustrate histories of the
early American West. Chances are slim, however, that the casual
reader has read a word these artists wrote. This gathering brings
the best of this literary art out of the shadows.
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PETER WILD is a professor of English at the University of Arizona
in Tucson. DONALD A. BARCLAY is a librarian at the Houston Academy
of Medicine/Texas Medical Center Library in Houston. JAMES H.
MAGUIRE is a professor of English at Boise (Idaho) State University.
The three scholars have previously collaborated on A Rendezvous
Reader: Tall, Tangled, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805–1850
(1997) and Into the Wilderness Dream: Exploration Narratives of the
American West (1994).
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 Different Travellers, Different Eyes
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