Jennifer Raab – författare

An important reconsideration of landscape photography in 19th-century America, exploring crucial but neglected geographies, practitioners, and themesAlthough pictures of the West have dominated our perception of 19th-century American landscape photography, many photographers were working in the eastern half of the United States during that period. Their pictures, with the exception of Civil War images, have received relatively scant attention. Redressing this imbalance is East of the Mississippi, the first book to focus exclusively on the arresting eastern photographs that helped shape America’s national identity. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, these works also documented the impact of war, promoted tourism, and played a role in an emerging environmentalism.  Showcasing more than 180 photographs from 1839 to 1900 in a rich variety of media and formats—from daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, tintypes, cyanotypes, and albumen prints to stereo cards and photograph albums—this volume traces the evolution of eastern landscape photography and introduces the artists who explored this subject. Also considered are the dynamic ties with other media—for instance, between painters and photographers such as the Bierstadt and Moran brothers—and the distinctive development of landscape photography in America.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Exhibition Schedule:National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.(03/12/17–07/16/17)New Orleans Museum of Art(10/05/17–01/07/18)

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable raised landscape painting to new heights and their work reached global audiences through the circulation of engravings. Thomas Cole, born in England, emigrated to the United States in 1818, and first absorbed the picturesque and sublime through print media. Cole transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American form of landscape painting. The authors here explore the role of prints as agents of artistic transmission and look closely at how Cole’s own creative process was driven by works on paper such as drawings, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Also considered is the importance of the parallel works of William Guy Wall, best known for his pioneering Hudson River Portfolio. Beautifully illustrated with works on paper ranging from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, as well as notable paintings, this book offers important insights into Cole’s formulation of a profound new category in art—the American sublime.Published in association with the Thomas Cole National Historic SiteExhibition Schedule:Thomas Cole National Historic Site(05/01/18–11/04/18)

On the two-hundredth anniversary of Frederic Edwin Church’s birth, leading scholars explore how his wide-ranging work continues to resonate in today’s world The work of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), renowned American landscape painter, was indelibly shaped by global travel. Church’s art was defined by place: early trips took him to South America, across the northeastern United States, and to the Arctic; later he visited the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East; in his final decades, he spent long sojourns in Mexico. Intimate drawings and oil sketches executed on-site illuminate his encounters with new environments and cultures. Large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition made him internationally famous. The designed landscapes, extensive collections, and striking architecture of his home, Olana, in the Hudson Valley, reflect the many worlds through which he traveled. In Frederic Church: Global Artist, original essays by scholars from across the humanities reveal Church as an artist enmeshed in the economic and territorial expansionism of the nineteenth century. Church’s works engage with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the artist in his time and demonstrates his continuing relevance in our own. Published in association with the Olana Partnership Exhibition Schedule: Olana NY State Historic Site(May 17–October 25, 2026)

How a single haunting image tells a story about violence, mourning, and memoryIn 1865, Clara Barton traveled to the site of the notorious Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where she endeavored to name the missing and the dead. The future founder of the American Red Cross also collected their relics—whittled spoons, woven reed plates, a piece from the prison’s “dead line,” a tattered Bible—and brought them back to her Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, DC, presenting them to politicians, journalists, and veterans’ families before having them photographed together in an altar-like arrangement. Relics of War reveals how this powerful image, produced by Mathew Brady, opens a window into the volatile relationship between suffering, martyrdom, and justice in the wake of the Civil War.Jennifer Raab shows how this photograph was a crucial part of Barton’s efforts to address the staggering losses of a war in which nearly half of the dead were unnamed and from which bodies were rarely returned home for burial. The Andersonville relics gave form to these absent bodies, offered a sacred site for grief and devotion, mounted an appeal on behalf of the women and children left behind, and testified to the crimes of war. The story of the photograph illuminates how military sacrifice was racialized as political reconciliation began, and how the stories of Black soldiers and communities were silenced.Richly illustrated, Relics of War vividly demonstrates how one photograph can capture a precarious moment in history, serving as witness, advocate, evidence, and memory.