Voyage dans l'Interieur de l'Amerique du Nord execute pendant les annees 1832, 1833 et 1834. BODMER, Karl (1809-1893, illustrator) - Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (1782-1867). Coblenz, Paris, and London: J. Hoelscher, A. Bertrand, Ackermann and Co., [1839-1841]
Large Folio (24 1/4 x 17 1/4 inches). 81 engraved and aquatint plates 48 large aquatint tableau plates [all 48 hand colored and heightened in gum arabic], & 33 vignette plates on full folio sheets [all 33 hand colored and heightened in gum arabic], Vignette X pasted down on contemporary paper. All 81 plates with Bodmer blindstamp. 1 large folding engraved map by Lieut.-Col.W. Thorn, titled “Map to illustrate the Route of Prince Maximilian of Wied,” hand colored in outline. Contemporary quarter calf with marbled boards, spine gilt, 8 compartments with 6 raised bands. contemporarily rebound and cover extended.
This masterpiece is the pinnacle of illustrated works devoted to North America, and unquestionably the greatest of all illustrated books devoted to North American Indians. Bodmer’s Travels in the Interior of North America is the paramount work on the American frontier and American Indian culture and is the result of an epic journey which took place at a time when the mass migration of settlers and pioneers was about to irrevocably alter the unspoiled West.
Karl Bodmer was a little-known Swiss painter when he was chosen by Prince Maximilian of Prussia to accompany his voyage to America. With the rest of Maximilian’s company, the two traveled among the Plains Indians from 1832 to 1834, a time when the Plains and the Rockies were still virtually unknown. They arrived in the West before acculturation had begun to change the lives of the Indians, and Bodmer, who was a protegé of the great naturalist von Humboldt, brought a trained ethnologist’s eye to the task. The Bodmer/Maximilian collaboration produced a record of their expedition that is incontestably the finest early graphic study of the Plains tribes.
Maximilian and Bodmer journeyed from St. Louis up the Missouri River on the American Fur Company steamboat “Yellowstone,” stopping at a series of forts built by the Fur Company and meeting their first Indians at Bellevue. The travelers continued on another steamboat, “Assiniboin,” to Fort Union, where they met the Crees and Assiniboins. The expedition spent its first winter at Fort Clark, where the Mandans in particular excited Bodmer’s attention, although he was also to draw the Minatarri and Crow peoples. The explorers continued by keelboat to Fort Mackenzie, which proved to be the westernmost point of their journey. After living among and studying the Blackfeet for several weeks, Maximilian decided that it was too dangerous to continue, so the travelers returned southward, reaching St. Louis in May 1834. After the conclusion of the journey, Bodmer spent four years in Paris supervising the production of the aquatints made from his drawings. These prints rank with the finest Western art in any medium, and they are the most complete record of the Plains Indians before the epidemics of the mid-19th century had decimated their numbers, and before the white man’s expansion had taken their lands. ABBEY TRAVEL 615. CLARK III:155, 1. HILLIER 898. HOWES 443A. MULLER 958. SABIN 47014. STREETER SALE 1809. WAGNER-CAMP 76:3