A sandbar in the Missouri, April 1833
On 19 April 1833 the steamer Yellow Stone lay stuck on a sandbar in the Missouri, a few days out of St. Louis, while the crew worked to float her off. A Swiss painter of 24 sat on the bank and drew the scene. The drawing became tableau 4 of the most ambitious picture book ever made about the American West, and the painter, Karl Bodmer, spent the next year drawing everything the river showed him.
Bodmer (1809 to 1893) is remembered almost entirely for that year. He had a long career afterwards as a landscape painter in France, but it is the watercolours of the Upper Missouri, and the 81 aquatints made from them for Prince Maximilian's Travels in the Interior of North America, that put him among the most important artists of the American frontier. We offer those plates in black and white and in colour.
Zurich, Koblenz and a travelling prince
Bodmer was born in Zurich. His uncle Johann Jakob Meier, an engraver of Swiss views, took him on as a pupil at thirteen and walked him through the Alps and along the Rhine to draw. By his early twenties Bodmer had moved with his brother to Koblenz, in Germany, where the two produced engraved views of the Rhine and Moselle for the tourist trade.
Near Koblenz lived Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied (1782 to 1867), a soldier turned naturalist who had explored Brazil in 1815 to 1817 and now wanted to do the same in North America, with a trained artist to record what his own pen could not. He saw Bodmer's work, hired him in 1832, and the two sailed for Boston that summer with the prince's hunter and taxidermist, David Dreidoppel.
Up the Missouri, 1833 to 1834
After a winter in New Harmony, Indiana, the party left St. Louis in April 1833 on the Yellow Stone, the American Fur Company's steamer, and travelled 2,500 miles upriver: by steamboat to Fort Pierre and Fort Union, and from there by keelboat to Fort McKenzie in Blackfoot country, near the present Fort Benton in Montana. Everywhere Bodmer painted: the river bluffs, the forts, the bison herds and above all the people. The Sioux, Assiniboine, Cree, Gros Ventres and Blackfoot sat for him, and his portraits are the most exact pictures of the Plains peoples made before photography.
The expedition spent the winter of 1833 to 1834 at Fort Clark, among the Mandan and the Hidatsa. There Bodmer painted the chief Mato-Tope, the Bison Dance and the Dog Dance of the warrior Pehriska-Ruhpa, the interior of an earth lodge, and dog sledges on the frozen river. In spring they came down the Missouri and sailed home in the summer of 1834.
Bodmer worked in watercolour and pencil, not in black and white. The plates of the book came later, in Europe, from his finished paintings.
From watercolour to aquatint
Back in Europe, Maximilian wrote his two volumes of text and Bodmer went to Paris to supervise the engraving of 81 of his paintings as aquatints: 48 large tableaux and 33 smaller vignettes, cut by some of the best engravers in France under his eye. The German edition was published in Koblenz from 1839, and French and English editions followed by 1844. The plates were printed in black and white and sold either so or coloured by hand. What is in the book.
Barbizon
Bodmer stayed in France. From 1849 he lived at Barbizon, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, among the painters of the Barbizon school, and became a French citizen. He painted the forest and its deer, illustrated books and magazines, and was a friend of Jean-François Millet. He died at Barbizon in 1893, at 84.
Bodmer's plates today
We offer all 81 plates and the map of the route in two forms. In black and white, as the aquatints were first printed. And in colour: giclées printed from copies that a colourist in America coloured by hand, in the manner of the coloured copies of the 1840s. The coloured prints are not reproductions of the original coloured edition. If you want a particular black and white plate coloured by hand for you, that is our Custom coloring service.
Each print is made for us by Re-Art Special Art Productions in Almere, at the size of the original plate, in an edition of 250, numbered in pencil, embossed with our blind stamp and with a certificate of authenticity. Start with the artist page.
Four plates to start with
Questions
When did Karl Bodmer live?
From 11 February 1809, in Zurich, to 30 October 1893, in Barbizon, France.
Why did Bodmer go to America?
Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied hired him in 1832 as the official artist of his expedition up the Missouri. Bodmer's task was to paint the landscapes and the peoples they met, which he did from April 1833 to the spring of 1834.
Did Bodmer make the aquatints himself?
No. He painted in watercolour on the journey; in Paris, professional engravers made 81 aquatints from his paintings under his supervision, for Maximilian's book.