American landscape painting was born not on the easel of Thomas Cole, but in the sketchbooks of British military officers like Thomas Davies and Governor Pownall during the French and Indian War. Elaborated by professional artists such as Paul Sandby, these North America vistas published in London as Scenographia Americana motivated a new generation of artists such as William and Thomas Birch, Joshua Shaw, William Guy Wall and Samuel Seymour to expand the Grand Tour aesthetic to the New World, again in the form of prints created for popular consumption. J.M.W. Turner cut his teeth translating topographical drawings of the Second Anglo-Mysore War for a booming art-publishing industry. Albert Bierstadt, F.E. Church and Thomas Moran all translated their grand visions of South America and the Rocky Mountain West into chromolithographs and etchings. In 1872 and 1874,  Appleton & Company released William Cullen Bryant’s Picturesque America; a compendium of scenic destinations across the United States. Its publication coincided with the rise of a tourism industry that delivered visitors to natural wonders that a nascent environmental movement hastened to protect.

A new set of prints is now being developed, built on this tradition. Drawn from my painting-journals, like the Sketchbook Traveler books produced by Schiffer Publishing, these individual prints celebrate personal travel with an environmentally mindful expeditionary spirit.

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