“Just because you have looked at something doesn't mean that you have seen it,” Harvard art historian Jennifer L. Roberts recently reminded us in a popular essay championing the role of sustained, deep engagement in twenty-first-century education. Her dictum “access is not synonymous with learning” resounds urgently in a present governed by the instantaneous, algorithmic delivery of information, where any hope of transforming access into learning lies in “time and strategic patience.”Footnote ¹ As much a meditation on praxis as an exploration of content, her new book, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, demonstrates just how much historical understanding a picture can yield when subjected to rigorous looking by a deft and creative scholar.

The studies in pre-digital “visual communication” in Transporting Visions exemplify what historian Richard White has described as a “small renaissance in historical writing,” wherein authors explore “unusual and uncommon topics. They juxtapose people, places and events not usually considered together, but whose pairing seems obvious once it is made.”Footnote ² What, Roberts asks, do the colonial society portraits of Boston painter John Singleton Copley have to do with John James Audubon's monumental work of natural illustration, The Birds of America (1827–39), or with American currency designer turned painter Asher B. Durand's mid-century landscape paintings? In each instance, images are also objects, negotiating what she terms “constitutive distance”: gaps in space and time that necessarily transform works of art into “active delegates rather than passive intermediaries” (3). Subject to injury, ruin and misinterpretation, these paintings, drawings and prints – in all their material and representational contingency – are not mere illustrations of history in the Atlantic world, but integral parts of that history.

The North Atlantic – that awesome, unpredictable and sometimes unnavigable 5,000-kilometer expanse between London and New York – occupies center stage in the first two studies on Copley and Audubon. Here, Roberts insists that readers recalibrate contemporary notions of space–time in order to attend carefully to the geographic, temporal and logistical distance between England and the colonies, and to regard the passage in between as a constitutive arena, rather than an absence of action. A serious, self-taught portraitist working in Boston, John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) relied on transatlantic feedback from the salons of London to shape his work. As Roberts meticulously documents in “Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley's Atlantic,” this lag in communication affected Copley's artistic choices and inspired compositional coping strategies: he simplified his subjects’ dress to ensure it would remain in fashion, and experimented with optical effects like mirroring sitters’ limbs on polished surfaces to participate in contemporary British conversations on harmony between tactile and visual perceptions. Each painting represents Copley's struggle to participate in discourses on art quite literally “at a distance,” a challenge to ensure that neither the physical paintings nor their representational content became lost in transmission.

Geographic and cultural distance cannot be uncoupled in this study, and transatlantic artists served as visual mediators and translators between different worlds. The second chapter, “Audubon's Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America,” explores translation across multiple registers: materiality versus abstraction, and the United States as both immediate reality and distant notional vista. Roberts cleverly situates John James Audubon's (1785–1851) turn to art as the result of his mercantile ruin in the Panic of 1819. She uses his betrayal by a burgeoning credit-based economy to explore an obvious but heretofore untreated question about his magnum opus: why is it so incredibly huge? The answer, she argues compellingly, lies in Audubon's dedication to “a pictorial logic of substitution and transposition instead of abstraction and exchange” (84), which required him to apprehend each species of bird in faithful life size. Moreover, Roberts shows that Audubon's effort to stabilize representational value amidst deracinating capital served a secondary function of transmission. His exquisite, life-size prints constituted the most realistic representations of American birds ever to reach England – far surpassing the desiccated ornithological specimens that had, for over a century, corroborated British naturalists’ smug conviction in the innate biological inferiority of American species. By revisiting Audubon's work with renewed scrutiny, Roberts sheds new light on the iconic, rugged naturalist by imbricating him in complex economic and ideological systems.

Roberts's final study, “Gathering Moss: Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape,” explores questions of representation through highly transmissible forms: telegraphic information and paper currency. Landscape painter Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) began his career as a currency designer and engraver, which involved complex, minute pattern work to foil counterfeiters. Rather than seeing this commercial stage of Durand's career as a vulgar precursor to the sublime landscape painting for which he is best known, Roberts treats them as sympathetic endeavors. Just as the intricate engraving on paper money bespoke the notes’ authenticity by ensnaring the eye and trapping its gaze, Durand's “sticky” landscape studies trapped and representationally encoded more than stunning vistas but also the haptic textures of place. Incorporating the new communications technology of Durand's day – the telegraph – is a component of the argument that will please some scholars and frustrate others for its careful handling of visual evidence but resistance to corroboration by other sources.

And yet, Transporting Visions does build bridges between disciplines, particularly those reliant on images and documents as their primary historical texts. As a work rooted in art history, its methods and pacing may be unfamiliar to readers accustomed to other disciplinary norms. Roberts's arguments unfold through rich, elegant analyses punctuated by complex moves, occasionally more elaborate than necessary. They are inspiring, however, for offering creative interdisciplinary strategies for those who study the nineteenth century and its social, political and technological legacies. These legacies are with us in our current digital age, perhaps more than we realize. As academic departments rush to rebrand our work through the sexy immateriality of “digital humanities,” Roberts's epilogue on “Material Visual Culture” resonates mightily. Challenging us to consider at once “two forms of space: the internal, imaginary space [that images] depict and the actual space they occupy, and through which they must pass” (164), Roberts compels us to remember that even bytes are cargo, moving through conduits of cable and capital that determine and order the world around us.