American Landscape Engravings
How We Looked in 1840

Ironically, at the very moment that photography was about to dominate the world of mass-produced images, a British publisher brought out one of the finest examples of engraved landscapes that anyone had done.

The 121 pictures of the American landscape, drawn by W.H. Bartlett (1809-1854), were intended as a kind of 19th-century laptop guide to the new country. Ranging from New Hampshire to Virginia, from Washington, D.C. to Niagara Falls, Bartlett captured a nation aborning with meticulous attention to detail and a fluent sketching technique equal to the challenge of the sights that lay before him.

As with tourists to this day, it was the wilderness that captivated him. Only a few pictures of early urban life interrupt the page after page of rivers, mountains, and the forest primeval rendered in the broken lines and half-shadings of a primitve technology that was about to be swept away by the incomparably higher resolution of photography.

Yet there is still something powerfully attractive about the product of eye, hand, pen, and paper. And patience. Instead of 1/100th of a second, here the "taking" of the picture is a matter of hours. The eye watches, the hand draws, and slowly, slowly an image appears of the landscape as it never really was, a composite of what the artist saw over time.

If you see a photograph of Indian Falls (the first engraving below), you think--actually, you don't even think it--you know that's how Indian Falls "looks". When you look at Bartlett's engraving of Indian Falls, the compulsion to verisimilitude is short-circuited. You know Indian Falls doesn't look like that. It doesn't matter. Not only does it not matter. The lack of reproduced accuracy is seductive, a powerful invitation to the viewer's imagination that says only, "Look! Imagine! Lose yourself in recreating the reality behind this complex set of black lines, just as I the artist did in making those lines."

Here are 16 of Barlett's engravings, much reduced in scale, resolution, and, alas, beauty, in order to get the files down to a low-bandwidth size. If the pictures speak as strongly to you as the did to us, you can get the complete set of 121 beautifully reproduced at scale and at a ridiculously low price by that treasure house of public-domain graphics, Dover Publications. Click here to go to the Dover site. Look for the book called "Bartlett's Classic Illustrations of America" (ISBN 0-486-41221-0).

For now, here are 16 treats for your eyes. You can jump to any image from the list below, or start with Number 1 and go through them sequentially:

1. Indian Falls, Cold Spring, NY.
2. Two Lakes Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, NY.
3. View of the Hudson River, Fort Putnam, NY.
4. Fort Ticonderoga Ruins on the Hudson.
5. Caldwell Landing on the Hudson.
6. Hyde Park, NY, view of the Hudson.
7. Sing-sing Village, NY, on the Hudson.
8. Niagara River.
9. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass.
10. New York City, from Weehawken.
11. Washington, D.C., from the White House.
12. Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
13. High Falls, Trenton, New Jersey.
14. View from Mount Holyoke, Mass.
15. Mount Washington, New Hampshire.
16. Squam Lake, New Hampshire.

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