page_title: Karl Bodmer
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Karl Bodmer / Later life
caption_attribution_description: The party in which Karl Bodmer was traveling stopped to camp along the Missouri River in North Dakota on November third of 1833. Watercolor
context_page_description: Johann Carl Bodmer was a Swiss-French printmaker, etcher, lithographer, zinc engraver, draughtsman, painter, illustrator and hunter. Known as Karl Bodmer in literature and paintings, as a Swiss and French citizen, his name was recorded as Johann Karl Bodmer and Jean-Charles Bodmer, respectively. After 1843, likely as a result of the birth of his son Charles-Henry Barbizon, he began to sign his works K Bodmer.
  Karl Bodmer was well known in Germany for his watercolours, drawings and aquatints of cities and landscapes of the Rhine, Mosel and Lahn rivers. After he moved to France following his return from an expedition in the American West, he became a member of the Barbizon School, a French landscape painting group from the mid-19th century. He created many oil paintings with animal and landscape motifs, as well as wood engravings, drawings, and book illustrations. For his work, Bodmer was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honour in 1877.
  He is best known in the United States as a painter who captured the American West of the 19th century. He painted extremely accurate works of its inhabitants and landscape.
context_section_description: After completing the expedition, Bodmer returned to Germany with Prince Maximilian, then traveled to France. In Paris he had many of his paintings from the expedition (81 in total) reproduced as aquatints. The Prince had these images incorporated into his book of the expedition, which was first published in German in Koblenz as Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834 in two volumes from 1839 to 1841. Its English translation, Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834, was published in London in 1843-1844.
  Bodmer moved permanently to Barbizon, France, and became a French citizen. Recorded as Jean-Charles Bodmer, he went by "Charles Bodmer". He became a member of the Barbizon School, a group of painters who specialized in landscapes and works featuring animals. He worked in a variety of genres: painting, etching, wood engraving and illustration. Among his well-known works from this period was La Foret en Hiver (Interior of the forest in winter), exhibited at the Salon 1850 in Paris. It was painted at Fontainebleau forest. Bodmer also made an engraving of his painting, and reproductions were popular in the 1860s. Impressionist Claude Monet later painted the same trees, titling his painting The Bodmer Oak. This scene was the subject as well of numerous photographs in the 1870s.
caption: A Stop; Evening Bivouac, 1833
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