Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century by Matthew N. Johnston (review)

How Americans depicted their nineteenth-century landscape in both fine art and ephemeral publications is the subject of this highly interpretive and insight-filled book. Much has been written on landscape depiction in the fine arts, but far less on the illustrations that appeared in publications intended for general audiences, such as the guides created to interpret the passing landscape for railway travelers. For years I have thought that the latter category deserved far more attention from scholars than it received, and I am pleased to see that art historian Matthew N. Johnston not only takes such ephemera seriously but also provides a convincing rationale for its study by fellow academics.

However, Johnston ends his study in the mid-1870s, well before the “color revolution” of the late 1890s made such publications more colorful and hence more compelling. Railroads in the United States and Canada issued thousands of these vibrant but ephemeral publications between the 1890s and the 1950s. Although the author does not mention the avalanche of such publications after 1890, his examination of a few early ones provides a good scholarly framework for study of the myriad later ones devoted to the trans-Mississippi West. One key feature of his analysis is to promote those creative individuals who sought to blend text and illustrations in their publications to achieve a kind of synergy that only the combination could create.

The author does not limit himself to early publications by or about railroads and their landscapes visible through the train windows. He devotes three chapters to studying how other popular publications, including those devoted primarily to ethnology and geology, portrayed the American landscape, particularly the largely unknown Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. For readers who are not trained in art history, the text is at times dense and challenging, but persistence has its own rewards in terms of applying Johnston’s case studies to the numerous other popular publications devoted to the nation’s landscape.

As good as Narrating the Landscape is, many of its illustrations fall short of achieving the synergy the author idealizes in the publications he studies. This problem is almost certainly not the fault of the author. The book’s paper is simply too absorbent to produce clear images. When viewed in color on the Internet, the famous painting by George Inness called The Lackawanna Valley shows clearly the cutover land that leads the viewer’s eye to the locomotive in the distance, but in Narrating the Landscape the foreground details are nearly invisible because the artwork is reproduced in black and white on paper that yields only muddy details. Ganging various color images on high-quality paper at the center of the book provides the details missing in some of the black-and-white illustrations, but that arrangement defeats the purpose of achieving synergy by joining the text and illustrations physically so as to complement one another.

But Johnston’s insights and the incredible depth of his research far outweigh any unfortunate shortcomings related to the publication process. The thirty pages comprising his notes are highly rewarding because the author composed numerous mini-essays and because the notes brim with suggestions for further reading. Anyone interested in print culture and vernacular publications devoted to the American landscape will want to add this title to his or her library.