The Prince & the Painter

One can never tell what will turn up in an old Rhine castle. In 1958, poking under the beds and into the closets of Neuwied Castle, a Knoedler Art Galleries executive found water colors and sketches that completed the most graphic record known of the look and life of the American West three decades after Lewis and Clark. Last week a third of the collection went on exhibition at Omaha's Joslyn Art Museum, the rest to follow in May.

In 1833, Alexander Philip Maximilian, naturalist, explorer, and Prince of Wied, decided to make a foray into the little-known Western regions of North America. He took along a young Swiss artist named Karl Bodmer to draw and paint what they could see. Their trip, which lasted a year, was filled with marvels of scenery and encounters with the Indians. At Fort McKenzie, in what is now Montana, Bodmer made portraits of the Blackfeet who came to trade there. One dawn the Blackfeet were attacked by neighboring tribes, jealous of the Blackfeet's trading privileges. Bodmer sketched the massacre--the best eyewitness scene of an Indian fight ever made--while the prince set down notes: "We were awakened by musket-shot upon which we rose in haste and loaded our fowling pieces with ball."

Later Bodmer and Maximilian spent five months at Fort Clark, in what is now North Dakota, where they were introduced to some Minnetaree chiefs by their interpreter, Toussaint Charbonneau. They apparently got friendly enough for the explorers to give one Indian a stovepipe hat. Bodmer's drawings of U.S. Indians were never hasty impressions but bold portraits of individuals, with meticulous notations of their clothing and decorations, their expressions and personalities. Back in Europe, Bodmer made engravings of 81 of his sketches and watercolors to accompany Maximilian's two-volume Travels in the Interior of North America (1839). Then all the art was put in the principality's archives, and left there.

Karl Bodmer lived the remainder of his life in Barbizon, the artists' colony in the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris, painting and teaching. One of his proteges was Jean Franc,ois Millet, and as Millet's fame ascended, Bodmer's diminished. Finally, in need of money, Bodmer was forced to sell part of his collection of Millet drawings and paintings. He died in 1893. His legacy of art was bought from Knoedler this summer by the Northern Natural Gas Co. of Omaha, whose board chairman, John Merriam, is a trustee of the Joslyn Museum. Northern keeps ownership of the art, but the museum becomes permanent custodian. Reported price: $750,000.

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