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PrintFirst View of the West
An incredible journey provided a young European artist a place in history
Charged with accurately depicting fauna from the New World, Bodmer was exacting in his detail, even in something so small as A Turtle, undated watercolor on paper.
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History of the exploration of the American West teetered on a fulcrum of faith as returning explorers sold stories of bravery and derring-do to the eager consumers of news, fantasy, tale and legend on the edge of the frontier.
Whether laid out over a campfire, etched by quill and ink in a journal, or slurred over the bar in a saloon, first accounts of the Rockies, the Upper Missouri, and Yellowstone, descriptions of mountains too high, rivers too big, a horizon too far, awed, stunned and strained the capacity of those who sought to absorb them.
Alexander MacKenzie kept a journal when he became the first foreigner to cross the continent in 1789. Lewis and Clark wrote meticulous accounts of their journey over the Continental Divide, but their rudimentary sketches were just that. Trappers like Osborne Russell wrote descriptive accounts that provoked the imaginative eye. But every engrossing adjective that graced their prose or talk, every estimate, guess, ponder or even measure ultimately endured scrutiny and, if too fanciful, derision.
What to make of painted dark-skinned people, an earth that vented steam, boiling rivers and wildlife that ran as far as the eye could see? Citizens in St. Louis and points east yearned for confirmation of these accounts—visual confirmation.
An Austrian artist, Karl Bodmer, who visited the frontier in 1833 and 34, created one of the first catalogs of the early Western scene for whites. Of course, other artists preceded him—even Native Americans. But Indian drawings on skin and hide, for all their art and storytelling, weren’t of the European visual dialect and didn’t provide Westerners with scenes they could easily interpret and understand. Bodmer’s mastery of perspective, framing, realistic presentation, character, form, detail and landscape rendered believable tableaux and vign-ettes of trans-Mississippi resplendency that Europeans, and American immigrants, had heretofore taken only on faith.
Two collections of his work will hang at the National Museum of Wildlife Art through the end summer and into the fall. Bodmer is best known for an atlas of prints made from etchings that he and craftsmen under his direction created in a Paris studio in the decade following the expedition. Those were based on sketches and watercolors completed in the field. For the show in Jackson Hole, a selection of those originals, focusing on wildlife, will hang through the end of August. An accompanying exhibit, of the prints that were part of the expedition’s documentation, will be on view through October 17.
Who was this artist who in his early 20s documented a disappearing socio-ecoscape and left historians with a rich record of tribes and customs, landscape and wildlife? And how did he come to travel across North America at a time when it was still wild and dangerous?
Born in Zurich in 1809, Bodmer was the nephew of an engraver and watercolorist from whom he began to learn his craft. Formal artistic education in Germany established him as a landscape artist who caught the attention of a prince in Koblenz. Maximilian zu Wied was an anthropologist and scientist who had already explored Brazil and who sought an artist to document his next great adventure. So, as part of Maximilian’s entourage, Bodmer sketched and painted three quarters of the way across the North American continent in a year-long journey that produced a portfolio epic in its scope, technique, artistry, historic significance and value.
