Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 1873–1874 by Claudine Chalmers (review)

In July 1873 French-born artists Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier embarked on a yearlong sketching adventure to chronicle the American West for Harper’s Weekly. The magazine commissioned the project to promote western industry and tourism as well as to satisfy its readers’ ongoing fascination with the region. Traveling by train, stagecoach, and horseback, the artists visited mining camps, frontier towns, cattle ranches, army forts, and Indian territory, completing one hundred vivid scenes of western life. Their first illustration appeared on October 18, 1873; their last on January 15, 1876. A considerable endeavor, the series helped shape the public’s understanding of the West and brought renown to its artists. Claudine Chalmers’s book offers a finely researched narrative of the journey and, notably, illustrates the complete portfolio of the engravings along with the captions that accompanied them. Proceeding chronologically, Chalmers offers a thorough discussion of each image, although in favoring painstaking description over analysis, she regularly repeats information the caption already provides. Nonetheless, she conveys the significance of the Frenzeny-Tavernier views that documented not only the striking sights and scenery of a region very much in transition twenty years before the closing of the frontier, but also the lives and experiences of its inhabitants.

Of note, Chalmers suggests that the duo, while tackling subjects similar to those illustrated by other recorders of the West, approached these subjects uniquely. Their conservationist-minded portrayals of hunting, for example, frequently express sympathy for the plight of animals. In Slaughtered for the Hide (December 12, 1874), the artists depicted the graphic brutality of buffalo skinning, with a hunter looming over the carcass of the majestic animal, brandishing its skin like a trophy (120). The book also benefits from Chalmers’s extensive knowledge of Frenzeny’s and Tavernier’s oeuvres. The pair took on other commissions and often sold artworks along the way to supplement their wages. The current locations of many of these works assisted her accurate mapping of the artists’ route. Chalmers also discusses periods in which they split up, such as Tavernier’s visit to Nebraska and his witnessing a Lakota Sun Dance ceremony. His name consequently appears first on Indian Sun Dance (January 2, 1875) and substantiates earlier conjecture that the degree of artistic contribution dictated an illustration’s order of signatures.

Tavernier’s lovely preliminary studies, many of which are reproduced here as color plates, usually provided the basic compositions for each illustration. These reveal his skill with light and color and knack for evoking place. Frenzeny would draw Tavernier’s sketch in reverse on wood (for engraving), adding his “journalistic touches,” including people and animals (50). He excelled at horses.

In San Francisco in the summer of 1874, upon completing their contract, the artists severed their partnership. Frenzeny continued to travel the globe while Tavernier became a notorious local bohemian. Though Tavernier’s tempestuous personality must have made him a difficult traveling companion, Chalmers characterizes the artists’ partnership for Harper’s Weekly as truly collaborative and remarkably positive, and their portfolio a brilliant union of Tavernier’s charisma and imagination and Frenzeny’s practicality and determination (200).