In a world where vast collections of digital image libraries like Artstor allow works of art from any place or time to be accessed and saved on hard drives, we need not consider the weight, scale, and fragility of objects, nor how they travel from the nebulous space of “the cloud” to our screens. In Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, Jennifer Roberts argues that we should not ignore the materiality of images or the often fraught processes of transporting them in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. In three chapters she demonstrates that John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, and Asher Brown Durand lived in periods consumed by transportation—across the Atlantic, back and forth from the American frontier, and over telegraph wires. Her subject is how these artists encoded within their images—consciously or unconsciously—references to the image’s status as a thing in motion. As Roberts asserts, “pictures could and did register the complications of their own transmission” (1).

The book’s task is a difficult one. Recent scholars, including Jennifer L. Anderson, Margaretta Lovell, and JoAnne Mancini, have discussed how objects in motion among far-flung outposts of the British Empire participated in a homogenization of culture and ideology that in effect shrank the Atlantic, at least conceptually. Roberts wants to take a full measure of the nautical miles between Boston and London or the endless skeins of telegraph wires, because she believes early American artists laced their work with cultural and psychological anxieties about transport. To accomplish this goal, she builds a theoretical armature drawn from anthropology and sociology, particularly linguistics, thing theory, and actor-network theory. She argues that images include a visual analogue to the linguistic concept of phatic speech, which is language about the “channel of communication” rather than language intended to broadcast the content or meaning of a message. As examples of phatic language, Roberts provides eighteenth-century letters that include inquiries from the sender about whether past letters have been received, or wondering whether the current one will be delivered, as a prelude to the business of the text (6). She deploys the phatic in conjunction with thing theory and actor-network-theory—which allow inanimate objects full participation in social networks—to posit images as “active delegates” in negotiating their meaning (3). Michael Ann Holly has characterized art history as a melancholy discipline because it works with “objects whose noisy and busy existence has long been silenced” (Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method,” The Art Bulletin 84 no. 4 [December 2002]: 661). Roberts, it seems to me, is demonstrating how some of the noise and a lot of the busyness—of creaking ships, hoisting stevedores, dying birds, and tapping telegraph operators—are embedded within the works; therefore, we can perhaps recollect them.

In each chapter, Roberts begins with thought-provoking, deceptively simple observations about the materiality of the art object and the difficulty of physical transmission that plays out in some aspect of her chosen artists’ work: Copley sent his works across the Atlantic for artistic validation; Audubon’s Birds of America (1827–38) folios are unwieldy and difficult to move; Durand’s detailed landscape sketches encourage stillness. She then performs close analysis of the compositions, iconography, allegorical content, precedents, and facture. Roberts combines visual evidence with historical context, particularly in regards to modes of transport, exposing phatic cues that demonstrate anxieties or trauma, primarily about transportation technologies on the part of the artist and his culture. She thus bonds theoretical and object-based approaches to comprehend the meaning of works traveling through space and time. Her argument works best when she can find direct points of connection between the artist, the work, and modes of transportation; it functions less well when she supports her conclusions with comparisons of coincidentally similar visual forms. It might be that a flying squirrel in flight is “the most perfect analogue imaginable of a stretched canvas in transit,” but Roberts provides no evidence outside visual comparisons to make this point. She argues that Copley included stationary, crouching squirrels in three paintings to convey this analogy to viewers, but does not indicate how contemporary audiences would have made this connection (49). Squirrels in flight can resemble myriad other things germane to Copley, such as full sails.

After dispatching his painting, Copley could not be sure exactly when or if A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) (1765) would arrive in London, nor when or if he would receive any response to it from Benjamin West or Joshua Reynolds, or whether, after its long ocean journey, the work would even be to current taste of the audiences who encountered it. Roberts discusses Copley’s multiple pictorial strategies to bridge time and space, which he used to assuage his nervousness about all of the above uncertainties. He presented the subject in profile to visually and conceptually link the painting to portraiture on coins and in prints—both highly portable media. Copley added the squirrel and glass to create a hybrid conversation piece, hedging his bets by producing a painting that was both a portrait and genre scene, which he hoped would meet with favor. The squirrel ties the composition together; the animal’s direct gaze, “like an internal pictorial supercargo, delivers the bundle of sensory information to the viewer.” Taken together, the references to portable print media and the North American squirrel, with its gold leash that traverses a distance of water located in a small glass, become the phatic elements of the painting (34, 60).

Roberts parses the spatial discontinuities in the painting, including the reflections on the mahogany tabletop and the placement of Pelham’s hand in relation to the glass of water, making a case that Copley had a thorough understanding of European art theory as well as the empirical philosophy of John Locke and George Berkeley (39–43). Her argument for Copley’s understanding of empiricism is primarily visual; there seems to be scant evidence that Copley definitively knew Berkeley’s work (43). However, by connecting Copley to philosophical arguments about optics and the nature of perception, Roberts further distances him from past scholarship that championed him as an American original whose work synthesized the needs of a literal-minded culture that prized observational realism. She presents a view of him as artistically sophisticated, augmenting the work of recent scholars who have studied his professional practice and relationship with patrons (34, 49).

Roberts’s chapter on Audubon will undoubtedly influence subsequent scholarship. Audubon’s double elephant folios The Birds of America frustrate one of its functions, which is, like most books, to be transportable. Although they are multiples and were consciously designed for distribution, their imposing size (each sheet is approximately 39.5 by 29.5 inches, and each bound volume weighs over 40 pounds) makes moving them difficult, if not prohibitive. The volumes are reference texts, but their size makes interacting with them—flipping pages—difficult. The folios are so large because Audubon reproduced the birds at the actual size of the carcasses he used as models: “Audubon’s bird pictures do not have a scale; they only have a size” (81). Through realistic size, the artist could insist that his illustrations are as close to the original as one can get in printed form. He placed calipers on the dead birds to measure them, and then put the same implements on the page, suggesting that he transcribed the fowl more than he reproduced them. Owners of the folios (and present-day librarians) strained to move them from shelf to display table. Seeing Audubon’s pictures of birds required readers to physically handle the images as the artist had the corpses (85). Audubon’s insistence on actual size had economic and nationalistic rationales as well. Size proved the authenticity of the work, refuting the possibility of counterfeiting or devaluation, both significant financial risks during the nineteenth century (113–15). The monumental scale of the birds also helped disprove European naturalists, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon, who contended that species are smaller, weaker, and less fertile in the New World. Audubon’s birds join Charles Willson Peale’s giant mastodon bones and Thomas Jefferson’s tables of brawny animals in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as projects that were as much nationalist as naturalist (104).

For all his claims to realism, however, Audubon created highly artificial compositions. He twisted large birds like pretzels into mannered poses. He locked them all into the single dimension of the picture plane, which becomes “a window that a bird has flown into: a surface that records a collision between a material body and the hard limits of a system built for illusion” (99). To get around the problem of smashed and frozen birds, Audubon included other birds in the background, but these ones are not to size, thus eroding his claims of authenticity. Roberts ultimately finds Audubon created tense, disquieting images that struggle to be “the index and the icon” simultaneously (97).

For Roberts, Audubon’s nearly preposterous assertion of actual size “emerges from and responds to the same forces that underlie modernity itself—capital flows, communication technologies, and upheavals in models of subjectivity” (103). She sees Audubon as wrestling with the nature of representation, as did late twentieth-century artists such as Jasper Johns and Mel Bochner. Ahistorical comparison aside, Roberts convincingly argues that art history should place Audubon squarely within mainstream discussions of American and European art rather then relegating him to role of artist-explorer or examining him within the confines of the history of science or ecocriticism.

If Copley and Audubon wrestled with problems of movement, Roberts finds Durand expressing stillness. She labels Durand’s series of detailed landscape studies created from the 1840s to the 1860s as “non-conducting” images: “viewers are meant to stand still before this sensitive surface and register themselves there—to be absorbed into the shallow surface, to be captured” (118, 159). She hinges her argument on visual correlations between Durand’s work as an engraver, particularly his ambitious work after John Vanderlyn’s painting Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (1809–14), and the compositions of his later oil studies. Durand’s meticulousness in conveying Ariadne’s flesh through a complex skein of hatching, cross-hatching, and dots holds the viewer’s eye like a complicated maze. Roberts compares Ariadne’s engraved breast to a late sixteenth-century image of a labyrinth, and, sure enough, both are round and have a central emphasis (130–31). However, there is less indication that Durand’s methods of engraving were different than that of other printmakers from the period, so it may be reaching to write that his “engraving work so clearly adopts the patterns of the labyrinth,” or that the image “superimposes the qualities of line engraving as medium on the larger drama of materiality and abandonment” (133). Visually, Roberts is on more solid ground when she discusses Durand’s compositional strategy as an effort to hinder progress from foreground to background. In the engraving, Ariadne’s body blocks the background, while in the landscape studies, rocks or organic material are obstacles to the viewer’s eye.

According to Roberts, Durand emphasized stillness in part due to an inability to come to terms with the telegraph, which “left behind” visual media in the alacrity with which it transmitted text (142). Although based on no primary documentation of Durand’s views on the telegraph, Roberts’s suggestion that transformative but unseen modes of communication affected artists during the nineteenth century seems to be an avenue for productive research, just as the railroad has been to a previous generation of scholars. Although the telegraph is less obtrusive in the landscape than railroads, it was perhaps no less influential on the visual culture that could not participate directly in it. The chapter is also valuable in substantively and completely connecting Durand’s early career as one of America’s most accomplished engravers to his artistic practice and technique.

Roberts ends Transporting Visions with examples of contemporary art that share visual or physical manifestations of movement with early American works. As with her often brilliant formal analysis, she is adept at toggling between past and present. Given the lack of corroboration in primary or contemporary secondary sources, skeptics may quibble over her presentation of visual metaphors—including the aforementioned squirrel as canvas and breast as labyrinth—as evidence that reveals the artists’ anxiety over transporting their visions. However, the primary value of the book is, in the end, not in the information it delivers. By exploring the affirmative role of images in their travels, consideration of their materiality, and exhaustive auditing of their surfaces, Roberts destabilizes our typical mode of regarding images as static objects in the museum and the classroom, exhorting readers to consider familiar images anew. If we conceptualize Copley’s, Audubon’s, and Durand’s images as on the march, perhaps it is easier to understand them as agents instead of inert artifacts.

Roberts’s emphasis on works of art communicating their transportability could also be applied beyond those created in early America. Contemporary artists are no less aware that their works may circulate to far-flung art fairs than Copley was that his paintings might land in London. The book may also be of use to curators and other museum professionals, who Roberts identifies as having “multisensory intimacies” with works of art, and who often arrange the transport of art objects or act as supercargoes (9). Roberts’s method of mixing chronologies might suggest productive interventions in exhibition design that could force the issue of time to the surface in museums. Transporting Visions feels like the beginning of a much larger project that examines how the invisible factors of time and space affect objects that artists create to be seen.