James McElhinney at Crown Point, New York
Travelers since the Medieval period have recorded their journeys by keeping journals noting itineraries, incidents and images. Voyages of exploration often had in their company artists like Jacques Le Moyne, John White or William Hodges, who filled sketchbooks with drawings and paintings with exotic destinations, flora, fauna and peoples. This practice was emulated by those following the Grand Tour, and further refined through the inclusion of chorographic drawing in the curriculum of eighteenth and nineteenth-century military academies. Alexander von Humboldt stressed the importance for exploring expeditions to include professional artists and naturalists. Decades before the invention of photography and cinema, works produced by expeditionary artists like Dominique Vivant Denon, Frederick Catherwood, Seth Eastman carried readers and print collectors off to faraway lands. Picturesque itineraries were popularized in America by artists such as William Birch, William Guy Wall, Pavel Svin’in and Jacques-Gerard Milbert. J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studiorum drew on this traditon, and upon a landscape esthetic codified two centuries earlier by Claude Lorrain. Schiffer Publishing will debut a new series of books in October 2020. Each will have a regional focus. The first looks at the Hudson Valley
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