Jessica Crabtree

February 6, 1809: Birth of portrait painter Karl Bodmer

Karl Bodmer was a Swiss-born artist best known for depicting the peoples and landscapes of the early American West.

Confluence of the Fox River and the Wabash in Indiana, watercolor (1832)

In 1832, an eager, energetic 23-year-old Bodmer was invited to accompany German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied and hunter David Dreidoppel on an expedition through the Upper Midwest. The eventful trip lasted two years and explored the regions surrounding the Ohio and upper Mississippi River valleys, part of the recently acquired Louisiana Territory. This region was home to the Lakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, and Blackfoot Indians – all of whom feature prominently in Bodmer’s work.

By the end of the journey, Bodmer had produced 400 original watercolors documenting the cultures, landscapes, flora and fauna encountered on the expedition. It took years to produce engravings of the entire collection. A portion of these became illustrations for Prince Max’s book, Travels in the Interior of North America.

Following his return to Europe, Bodmer spent the duration of his long career making a living as an esteemed landscape painter. While popular at first, his American paintings fell into oblivion for many years, until they were acquired by US collectors in the mid 1900s. Recently a huge cache of his journals and sketchbooks were uncovered in the possession of Prince Max’s descendants; today they have joined the illustration plates in the Joslyn Art Museum.

The Interior of a Hut of a Mandan Chief, mixed media (1834)

Karl Bodmer’s paintings are archetypes of historical Native American portraiture. Like the works of George Catlin, Charles Bird King, and Edward Curtis, they are nearly ubiquitous and have proven themselves more valuable with the passage of time.

They are highly regarded for their painstaking accuracy – a fact even more remarkable considering the less than ideal circumstances under which they were produced. In an era before cameras were widespread, Bodmer succeeded in capturing a rich and authentic image of the period’s natural landscape and of the Indians who still lived freely in the northern Plains.

Another central aspect of Bodmer’s work is its objectivity. As a continental European, his portrayals were not shaped by the same biases that often tainted those of his American contemporaries – making them as vivid and relevant today as when they were first captured.

Marshall B. Davidson writes in American Heritage:

“Almost everything Bodmer produced on his American journey was intended for reproduction, to provide specific graphic reports of the Prince’s observations; but, as his admirer Théophile Gautier remarked in later years, the youth had “the soul and eye of a painter,” and the purely artistic quality of his work was never lost in the reportorial realism that was required of him.

At times he was confronted by what must have seemed almost unbelievable prospects—the kind of nightmarish landscape and grotesque savagery that the Federalists with their eastbound imaginations (and political biases) were so quick to dismiss as figments of Jefferson’s enthusiasm. But he depicted these utterly alien sights without distortion, without reading into them what he had been taught and what he remembered that the world about him should look like. And in so doing he produced illustrations that, in their fidelity and charm alike, present an unsurpassed image of a vanishing America.”

One effect of Bodmer’s works, and their initial popularity, was the establishment of the Plains Indian in the public image of Native Americans. At a time when most Americans lived east of the Mississippi, Bodmer’s widely publicized paintings of the Western frontier and its native cultures captured the imaginations of people on two continents and created a precedent for later works of this genre.

Swiss Info: Karl Bodmer Exhibition and Image Gallery

National Agricultural Library: Bodmer and Maximilian

American Heritage Magazine: Carl Bodmer’s Unspoiled West

The Essence of Line: Bodmer sketchbooks

Bodmer’s Journey – companion website for the award winning docudrama