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One of the most powerful landscape images to emerge from Karl Bodmer’s celebrated expedition with Prince Maximilian of Wied, this hand-colored aquatint captures the grandeur of Niagara Falls with a vividness and compositional elegance unmatched in 19th-century printmaking. Bodmer first encountered the Falls on 28 June 1834, near the conclusion of the two-year journey through the North American interior. The party had departed Vincennes, Indiana in early June, followed the Ohio River through Louisville and Cincinnati, and made their way via the Ohio Canal and Scioto River to Lake Erie, before steaming to Buffalo. By the time they reached Niagara, Bodmer had already produced an extraordinary visual ethnography of the Upper Missouri. This final stop offered an opportunity for something different: a confrontation not with cultural specificity, but with raw natural spectacle.
Long a favored subject of artists and travelers, Niagara Falls had already become a symbol of American sublimity by the time of Bodmer’s visit. Yet this rendition—engraved by Louis Weber and published in Paris and London in 1841—is arguably the finest of its kind. The Falls are rendered with both grandeur and restraint, their roar conveyed through billowing mist and the sweep of plunging water, while a lone bald eagle glides low over the river’s surface, anchoring the scene in Romantic solitude. The composition fuses European pictorial tradition with American scale and immediacy.
Though better known for his images of Indigenous life, Bodmer’s Niagara Falls demonstrates his remarkable range, blending scientific precision with atmospheric subtlety. As the culmination of the Reise in das innere Nord-America, it serves as both a visual crescendo and a rare European rendering of one of North America's most enduring natural icons.
![[Land deed to Isaac Hollister in the Township of Marbletown, NY.]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/106912.jpg)
