Karl Bodmer

Karl Bodmer (1809-1893)

Karl Bodmer is considered by many authorities to be the greatest nineteenth-century artist to have produced prints of the American West. In 1832 he came to America with his patron, Prince Maximilian of Wied, to put together as complete a study as possible of the western territories of the United States. The result was the publication of Maximilian’s journals in successive German, French, and English editions between 1839 and 1843, and with it, a picture atlas of eighty-one aquatint plates after paintings by Bodmer. Bodmer was a keen observer of a world that few Europeans had ever seen or described and proved himself one of the ablest landscape painters of the American West.