St. Louis Mercantile Library

 

    E_Bodmer Stone Walls               E_Moran              E_intro

    Fort Clark on the Missouri            The Grand Canyon of Arizona

           Karl Bodmer, 1834                           Thomas Moran, 1912

St. Louis was founded near the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers because of the advantage this location offered for transportation and commerce. As the “Gateway to the West” it was a natural stopping-off point for the artists who set out to explore the new frontier via steamboat and overland travel.

 

E_Wild_carondelet                 Wimar drawing             E_Catlin_CatchingWildHorse 

           View of Carondelet                                     Sketch of the Upper Missouri                                   Catching the Wild Horse

      John Caspar Wild, 1841                                               Carl Wimar, 1859                                            George Catlin, 1844

Artists were not alone in recognizing the need to document the frontier. In 1847, an art critic writing for The Literary World urged artists to preserve the vanishing wilderness, saying;

"The axe of civilization is busy with our old forests. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts . . . where the wild deer roamed in freedom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufactures . . . Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is too late."

 

E_Lewis_PiasaRock                   E_Schultz               E_Wimar_landscapeboulders 

     The Piasa Rock                                                              Prairie Fire                                                           Landscape with Boulders

Henry Lewis, 1847                                                       Louis Schultze, ca. 1880                                                     Carl Wimar, 1872