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Show 128 Martius, and Heinrich Schinz, were all influenced by this romantic scientific Naturphilosophie. According to William H. Goetzmann, a German fascination with the origins of the "Volk" found its living enbodiment in the unspoiled, archaic cultures of the Upper Missouri tribes. They revealed an endlessly fascinating romantic horizon that took one so deep into the past as to virtually touch upon the origins of human life on earth. Because Maximilian and Bodmer's investigations were conducted in scientific fashion does not mean that they did not evoke the most profound of romantic emotions. This is clearly the case with Bodmer's accurate though haunting drawings and watercolors. They are the artistic embodiment of an age of emergent romantic science. Maximilian meant them to be just that. To him the Indian people he studied were anything but commonplace. They were exotic specimens from the backcountry of the world that perhaps cast a light on the origins of all human beings in a history-conscious age. Karl Bodmer's America, p. 15. 13. The European perceptions of both the Greek and Roman classical past and also of America were to a great extent wish-fulfillment dreams. But the former was static, the latter constantly developing. And whereas Europeans tended to regard Antiquity as their parent, to be revered, America was their child-inheritor and repository of their own virtues and vices, aspriations and fears." Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1975), p.2. 14. References to the Byronic were not subtle. Paintings and prints depicting the adventures of these men were pure romance, often showing a solitary European figure moodily contemplating an exotic wilderness that threatens to overwhelm him. A particularly good example of such art is an etching, Humboldt and Bonpland on the Orinoco, after a painting by Keller, reproduced in Honour's The New Golden Land, p. 171. 15. Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 bis 1817 (Frankfurt: Heinrich Ludwig Bronner, 1820. 2 vols.). 16. The idea of "the noble savage" was embodied in the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau and in the literature of James Fennimore Cooper, as well as in the art of men such as Benjamin West (The Death of Wolfe. 1770) and Joseph Wright of Derby (The Indian Widow. 1785). |
