Karl Bodmer
Swiss, 1809 - 1893
Swiss painter and graphic artist, active in the USA and France. Bodmer’s earliest exposure to art probably came from his uncle, the landscape painter and engraver Johann Jakob Meyer (1787–1858). When he was 22, Bodmer moved to Paris, where he studied art under Sébastien Cornu. In Paris he met his future patron, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, who was planning an ambitious scientific expedition to North America. Bodmer was engaged to accompany the expedition and to provide sketches of the American wilderness. After touring the East Coast, the party made their way westward via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to St Louis, MO, and in 1833 travelled up the Missouri River into country scarcely inhabited by white men. On the journey north to Ft MacKenzie, WY, Bodmer recorded the landscape and the groups of Indians they encountered. Having wintered in Ft Clark, ND, they returned to New York and then Europe in 1834.
Bodmer’s paintings of Indians are full of carefully observed anthropological detail. His delicate, linear style and subdued palette give a savage splendour to such works as Péhriska-Rúhpa, Hidatsa Man, also known as Two Ravens (Omaha, NE, Joslyn A. Mus.). In his masterpiece, Bison Dance of the Mandan Indians (known only in engraving), Bodmer shows a skill in dramatic composition unmatched by his contemporary George Catlin. His watercolour sketches were exhibited in Europe to admiring audiences. The journals of the expedition were published in 1839 with aquatint illustrations based on Bodmer’s watercolours. In 1849 he established himself in the Barbizon colony in France, where he painted such works as Forest Scene (1850; Paris, Pal. Luxembourg), exhibited regularly at the Paris Salons and was associated with Jean-François Millet. The Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, has an important collection of Bodmer’s paintings.
Leslie Heiner. "Bodmer, Karl." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T009520 (accessed April 27, 2012).
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