Bodmer’s depictions of North America profoundly impacted the way in which we understand the American landscape.
Karl Bodmer, The White Castles on the upper Missouri, Herd of Bisons on the upper Missouri, and Niagara Falls, published in Travels in the Interior of North America 1832 to 1834, 1832–43, hand-colored aquatint, 45.7 x 61 cm (Art Bridges). Speakers: Laura Vookles, Chair of Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum, and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory
0:00:05.2 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Hudson River Museum looking at three prints by a Swiss artist whose name is Karl Bodmer. So we’re looking at objects that function in at least two ways. These are works of art, but they’re also scientific tools.
0:00:19.9 Laura Vookles: They document a period when exploring the interior of the American continent was relatively new. And when taking an artist with you was really the only way that people learned about the scenery of the country, and also the people who were later so thoroughly and actively forgotten, who were still living in these areas. There was a great interest in the American continent in Europe. So, in this case, we had Prince Maximilian from Prussia, and he wanted to make a trip to the United States to study it and bring with him an artist. And that artist was Karl Bodmer.
0:01:00.1 Steven Zucker: When you look at some of these prints, you see a kind of focus on the geology. For example, I’m looking at this print of the White Castles. This is in what is now Montana on the Upper Missouri River. And when the explorers first came to this, they actually thought that at a distance, perhaps these were castles. When they got closer, they realized these were extraordinary rock formations.
0:01:23.4 Laura Vookles: One thing that’s interesting about these though, is it’s really putting an emphasis on the panoramic, which was a newer idea at the time. You had some people making these grand life size panoramas that they would scroll like in a movie theater to get a sense of the vastness of nature and the wonder. And so in those earlier types of landscapes, when you think back, Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain, they have these framing trees and this very enclosed view which does start out with a water feature leading you into the distance like you see here. But here you don’t have that frame. You imagine the panorama just extending on outside the frame.
0:02:03.9 Steven Zucker: The water is important, the water that leads us in visually. But this is also the means of conveyance.
0:02:10.3 Laura Vookles: You’ll notice that in almost every engraving there is water. There is the Missouri River. That’s because they were traveling along the Missouri River in these days before roads into the interior, certainly before the railroad.
0:02:24.2 Steven Zucker: One of the prints that renders an area close to the junction of the Yellowstone and Upper Missouri Rivers is filled with American bison, an enormous and powerful animal that populated the American West in the 19th century and which Native Americans depended on.
0:02:40.4 Laura Vookles: And certainly the bison were for many people, an emblem of the American west, especially in Europe. And this one speaks to me for so many reasons. You have this huge herd of bison coming to drink in the evening, but you also cannot help with our modern eyes, think back to what the trajectory of the history of the Native Americans and the bison was. Only a few decades after this print, Albert Bierstadt would paint his famous painting, The Last of the Buffalo.
0:03:12.7 Steven Zucker: The colors are fairly dark, especially in the foreground, except for the reflectivity of the stream that’s immediately before us. All of the light is in the sky. And it seems to me that the artist is working hard to create a kind of ideal image of the American West, of its majesty, of its beauty, of its grandeur, for an audience that is on the eastern seaboard of the United States, but mostly in Europe, people who would never have the opportunity otherwise to see this. The expedition was actually quite successful. It was able to go quite far, close to the headwaters of the Upper Missouri in the Rocky Mountains. But when they reached that, they cut northward because they wanted to see Niagara Falls.
0:03:56.3 Laura Vookles: By the 1830s, Niagara Falls was considered an iconic scene in America, not to be missed, the epitome of the European ideal of sublimity in landscape. One of the most famous sites was the Horseshoe Falls, which almost any American painter later, and many European artists, too, would travel to see and record.
0:04:19.9 Steven Zucker: Thomas Jefferson himself had recommended that artists depict Niagara Falls. It seems that there was a conscious attempt to make this an iconic image that could represent the grandeur and beauty of the United States.
0:04:32.9 Laura Vookles: And people were traveling there with Native American guides in the 1700s. And you have this iconic view with the Horseshoe Falls stretching side to side. Again, a panorama. And it’s got a boat by the rocks so that you see the scale of the falls. And then he cannot resist having the American eagle fly right through the center of the painting, just in case the significance of the scene is not appreciated.
0:05:00.7 Steven Zucker: Now, all of these prints and many more were produced for a lavish publication. That was the documentation of this journey. It was an economic failure, but it did cement this expedition as one of the most thoroughly documented, one of the most scientifically rigorous of its day. And this expedition, as well as those that came before and after, have had a profound impact on the way in which we understand the American landscape.
0:05:28.9 Laura Vookles: Scenes like this sold the idea of Manifest Destiny and of settlers moving out West. And it is no accident that often, not so much in scientific studies like this, but in many other paintings, there is not a Native American to be seen, because the idea was to sell the land as empty and available.
