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Show 28 enormous and considerable amounts of published material concerning the aquatints has been written by scholars in these fields. After the original watercolors became available, interest in the prints all but disappeared, since it was believed that they had lost much of their significance as historical documents.4 The aquatints, then, have long been evaluated as documents and although they have been compared with the watercolors, they have never been comprehensively examined and judged solely on their own artistic merit. In summary, the method by which the aquatints have been examined and compared has never been clearly defined. Distinctions must be made about what is being analyzed-the watercolors or the aquatints--and whether the images are to be judged as documents or as works of art, keeping in mind the differences inherent in the two separate media and that each was produced for a different purpose. Under these constraints it is possible to construct a methodology, based upon detailed comparisons of the watercolors and the succeeding states of the prints, in which both the documentary and the artistic value of the aquatints can be examined. Applying the Methodology: Is it both Document and Art? Detailed Comparisons of Source Materials and Aquatint States The preliminary examination of Tableau 25, Idols of the Mandan Indians, demonstrated the ease with which information inherent in an image could be extracted and evaluated. However, Tableau 25 is a simple image, containing few elements and, therefore, relatively little interpretive information can be gleaned from it. One of Bodmer's most elaborate aquatints, Tableau 27, |