Niagara Falls
Engraved by Weber Printed by Bougeard (unavailable - please enquire)
Tableau 39. Niagara Falls
$1,300.00

Presented out of sequence in the atlas of aquatints published in Europe is Bodmer's depiction of Niagara Falls, one of North America's most celebrated natural wonders and probably the last American subject that Bodmer painted.

Having returned to St. Louis from their voyage down the Missouri in the spring of 1834, the travelers continued eastward on the Ohio River and then northward via the Ohio Canal to Lake Erie, where they boarded a lake steamer for Buffalo, New York. Bodmer saw Niagara Falls for the first time on June 28, 1834. Maximilian included a description of the falls in his journal entry for this date.

Back in Europe, Bodmer produced a finished watercolor of the falls from earlier sketches. Except for the addition of the bald eagle swooping low over the waters at left center, this watercolor, now owned by the Joslyn Art Museum, was reproduced almost exactly in the published print.

Niagara Falls was a popular subject with both native and foreign artists and frequently depicted throughout the nineteenth century. Thomas Cole and Frederic Church painted famous views of it which remained unexcelled in the field of American landscape, until the grandiloquent panoramas of the Far West by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and Thomas Moran gradually replaced them in the public eye.

A view of the Cleveland lighthouse on Lake Erie was featured as Vignette XXXII in this series.

Text by David Hunt, Director, Stark Museum, Orange, Texas, USA

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