Long before Hollywood brought the landscapes of the American West
to movie screens, clever impresarios invented ways of simulating
the experience of western travel and selling it to mass audiences.
In 1851, entrepreneur John Wesley Jones hired artist William
Quesenbury to join such a venture. Quesenbury and other artists
traveled the overland trails through Nebraska Territory to sketch
the "scenery, curiosities, and stupendous rocks" they encountered,
and Jones used selected material for his "Pantoscope," a gigantic,
scrolling panoramic painting. "Scenery, Curiosities, and Stupendous
Rocks" gathers 71 of Quesenbury's sketches from the Jones
expedition and a gold rush trip the year before. These works in
pencil are illuminated by eyewitness accounts from the period,
modern maps, contemporary photographs, and descriptive notes.
David Royce Murphy, Michael L. Tate, and Michael Farrell set
Quesenbury's depictions, including Pikes Peak and Courthouse Rock,
in historical context. Their insightful essays offer accounts of
the artist's mid-century travels, the worlds of panoramic art and
field exploration, and the contemporary conception of natural
space. In exploring these topics, the book offers alternate
conclusions about the purpose of the sketches. Jones's moving
panorama opened in late 1852 under the title "Pantoscope of
California, Nebraska & Kansas, Salt Lake & the Mormons" and
was wildly popular on Boston and New York stages. Today, the
Quesenbury sketches are all that remains of Jones's project. The
sketches reproduced here, rare records of that ambitious enterprise
as well as the sights en route to California gold, offer evidence
of the way mid-nineteenth-century Americans envisioned the
West.
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