The first major study to examine the artistic output of Robert Walter Weir and his two sons, John Ferguson Weir and Julian Alden Weir

During the nineteenth century, gridding, graphing, and surveying proliferated as never before as nations and empires expanded into hitherto "unknown" territories. Though nominally geared toward justifying territorial claims and collecting scientific data, expeditions also produced vast troves of visual and artistic material. This book considers the explosion of expeditionary mapping and its links to visual culture across the Americas, arguing that acts of measurement are also aesthetic acts. Such visual interventions intersect with new technologies, with sociopolitical power and conflict, and with shifting public tastes and consumption practices. Several key questions shape this examination: What kinds of nineteenth-century visual practices and technologies of seeing do these materials engage? How does scientific knowledge get translated into the visual and disseminated to the public? What are the commonalities and distinctions in mapping strategies between North and South America? How does the constitution of expeditionary lines reorder space and the natural landscape itself? The volume represents the first transnational and hemispheric analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic aesthetics, and features the multi-disciplinary perspective of historians, geographers, and art historians.

This is the first installment of a fully illustrated catalogue of the Academy's priceless collection of paintings and sculptures.

How has religion affected the creation and patronage of American art? This is the question explored in 'The Visual Arts and Christianity in America', the most comprehensive treatment of this subject to date. With its 184 illustrations, the volume is a visual and textual survey of both the religious paintings, statuary, and architecture produced in America since colonial times and the attitudes toward such art expressed by the artists, the clergy, and the religious press. By means of a multifaceted approach that includes investigation of biographical, journalistic, art historical, as well as religious literature, a broad range of art objects and buildings are carefully placed in their social and intellectual context. Part One presents the colonial backdrop, both English and Spanish, against which and out of which the ensuing developments in American art and religious life took shape. Part Two treats nineteenth-century views of art and architecture, focusing on the views held by the clergy and conveyed in religious journals as well as the religious views of the artists and architects themselves. In Part Three, devoted to art in private and public life, major issues emerge that will remain as such into the twentieth century: the relation between nature and history, the place of art in civil religion, and the presence or absence of explicit biblical themes. The fourth and entirely new portion of the book, devoted to the twentieth century, examines the continuities and discontinuities in style and content between nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in relation to spiritual and religious perceptions.