Beyond the Endless River: Western American Drawings and Watercolors of the Nineteenth Century

Beyond the Endless River documents the drawings and watercolors that nineteenth-century artists made as the American West opened to view, the firsthand visual record of a landscape and its peoples before the camera took over. Issued by the Phoenix Art Museum in 1979 to accompany an exhibition, with essay and catalogue by James K. Ballinger, later the museum's longtime director, it gathers works by figures such as Seth Eastman and includes a haunting cover image of Plains burial scaffolds drawn by Rudolf Daniel Ludwig Cronau.

This oblong softcover exhibition catalogue is exactly the kind of ephemeral institutional publication that quietly becomes a reference. Its plates, including Eastman's "Indian Sugar Camp" and Frederick Hawkins Piercy's "Independence Rock," preserve images that connect Western American art to the documentary impulse of the frontier era. Clean catalogues like this one, with their provenance to a specific museum show, are worth keeping intact for anyone studying how the West was first pictured.