Picturesque America;: Illustrations from the original 1874 edition, colored in the style of the period. The mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, ... of our country by eminent American artists

Dust jacket notes: "One hundred years ago a two-volume, leather-bound work titled Picturesque America was published in New York. Among the many excellent illustrations in these volumes were forty-nine steel engravings that are classics of nineteenth American illustration. In this book those forty-nine engravings, now hand colored, are reproduced once again. They provide a unique picture of America during the early 1870's, from the coast of Maine to Florida and along the shores of the Pacific, crisscrossing the whole country in between. The artists include some notable American landscape painters and illustrators of the time: John F. Kensett, Worthington Whittredge, J.W. Casilear, Thomas Moran, Homer Martin, Harry Fenn, J.D. Woodward, Granville Perkins, F.O.C. Darley, and A.C. Warren. As Oliver Jensen, Editor of American Heritage, says in his preface, these artists show America at a time 'when cities looked different from each other, the time before cubelike skyscrapers, the time when a Providence or a Cincinnati or a St. Louis took pride in its character and uniqueness....This is not rainy-day America, nor New York of the Bowery, but picturesque America, the wonders and achievements that an optimistic age wished to show as its face to the world.' The great poet and editor William Cullen Bryant brought the original Picturesque America together. He wrote: 'It is the purpose of the work to illustrate with greater fullness, and with superior excellence as far as art is concerned, the places which attract curiosity by their interesting associations, and, at the same time, to challenge the admiration of the public for many of the glorious scenes which lie in the by-ways of travel.' One hundred years later the classic engravings from Picturesque America, printed in this book by an advanced color-printing technique undreamed of by the original publisher, will give modern viewers a nostalgic look at the America of that 'optimistic age.'"