Henry Lewis (artist)

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Henry Lewis (born January 12, 1819 in Newport , Shropshire , England ; † September 16, 1904 in Düsseldorf ) was an American landscape and genre painter who lived in the Düsseldorf school's painting milieu from 1853 until his death . From 1867 to 1881 he was also consular agent of the United States of America in Düsseldorf. He gained special importance in the middle of the 19th century as the creator of a moving panorama and a richly illustrated book of the Mississippi River .

Life

childhood

Lewis was born to Thomas G. Lewis in Newport, a small town in the West Midlands of England. In 1829, when he was ten, he emigrated to Boston with his father and two brothers in the United States, where he received a brief formal education. Then he started training as a carpenter. As an avid reader, he visited a library in his spare time, which among other things enabled him to read James Fenimore Cooper's romantic portrayals of the Wild West . In 1836 Henry Lewis and his father moved to St. Louis , Missouri , where George T. Lewis, Henry's brother, was already living and Henry found a job as a set builder for the theater and opera house. They both took US citizenship in their new place of residence.

Early years as a painter

Saint Louis in 1846 , painting, 1846
Cheever's Mill on the St. Croix River , painting, 1847

As a young man, Henry Lewis decided to become an artist. In 1845 he opened a studio with James F. Wilkins, a trained painter from England . Soon his largely autodidactic painting training had reached a level that by local standards he was regarded as a "landscape painter of more than ordinary merit". One of his first subjects was a panoramic view of properties in affluent suburbs on the Illinois riverside of St. Louis that he called Western Metropolis . In 1846 he sent the painting to the American Art Union . He then presented it at an exhibition in St. Louis and won first prize. His artistic interest was particularly the Mississippi River , which he explored on study trips in 1846, 1847 and 1848. On his trip in 1847, he accompanied the geologist David Dale Owen on an exploration trip into the St. Croix Valley . Since then he has also been a frequent guest of the Army Captain and painter Seth Eastman (1808-1875), then commandant of Fort Snelling , and his wife, the writer Mary Henderson Eastman (1818-1887). On his study tour of 1848, Lewis was accompanied by journalist John S. Robb, who sent the St. Louis Reveille newspaper vivid reports of the river trip together. Robb also told newspaper readers that Lewis' sketches were developing into a moving panoramic image of the Mississippi to be presented in front of an audience by scrolling images of river views of cities and scenes. Lewis had probably made the plan for this since about 1846 and developed it continuously. He probably got the impetus for this from other manufacturers who at the time displayed their panoramas publicly in St. Louis or wanted to develop panoramas, in particular from the Franco-American painter Leon Pomarede , with whom he temporarily cooperated in 1848. Between 1846 and 1849 six moving panoramas were presented to the public in St. Louis and other cities, in 1846 the supposedly three-mile panorama by John Banvard, in 1848 the Leviathan panorama by John Rowson Smith, the length of which was even given as four miles. In September 1848, Lewis assembled a team that transferred his sketches onto large canvases to create the actual panorama, 12 feet wide and over 1,300 feet long. For this he won the experienced panorama painter John R. Johnson, but also the later architect Edwin F. Durang, the later stage painter John Leslie and James B. Laidlow, a stage painter from Scotland.

The time as a panorama showman

After the panorama was completed in August 1849, it was subsequently performed successfully in St. Louis and on a major American tour that went from Milwaukee via Chicago to the major cities on the east coast. The presentation was in two parts - one part Upper Mississippi and one part Lower Mississippi - at two different, mutually coordinated locations, each with a reading of explanations of the individual scenes shown and with musical accompaniment. His partner in presenting the panorama was Washington King, who later became Mayor of St. Louis. Other performances in Canadian cities had less success, so that Lewis decided at the end of 1851 to present the panorama in his native Great Britain. After performances in England, he moved on to The Hague in the Netherlands in the spring of 1852 . At the end of 1852 he exhibited the panorama in the Cürten'schen Saal on Berger Strasse in Düsseldorf. According to the painter Charles Wimar , the work failed to have an impact on the German public. In 1853 Lewis settled in Düsseldorf, from where he undertook further tours with his "Original Travel Cyclorama ". However, when it turned out that he could hardly make a profit with the picture, he decided to sell it. He found a buyer in 1857 in a Dutchman named Hermens (or Hermans) who, after paying only half the purchase price, shipped himself and the picture to Calcutta in the summer of 1860. Reports about the further whereabouts of the picture do not exist.

The picture book about the Mississippi

View of New Orleans (Louisiana) , double-sided panorama from the book The Illustrated Mississippithal , 1854

Lewis may have had business contact with Heinrich Arnz , the owner of the publishing company Arnz & Comp, since 1848 . from Düsseldorf to create a "work on the Mississippi". In any case, the literary and lithographic work for the picture book with the title Das Illustrierte Mississippithal took shape in the years up to the fall of 1857, before the complete German-language version of the book with 431 pages and 54 lithographs could go on sale. The work, which was published in parts as early as 1854, described the German-speaking readers in a collection of reports that Lewis had compiled without naming sources, the areas of the Mississippi as well as events in its history and customs of its inhabitants. In 1858 the company Arnz & Comp. the owner as a result of a fraud scandal. The project of the English-language edition The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated , the first part of which was advertised in the New York Daily Tribune as early as 1854 , was affected by this. Only fragments of it were published by an Aachen publishing house and have been preserved.

Life in the Düsseldorf painter milieu

When Lewis settled in Düsseldorf in 1853, the city on the Rhine with its renowned art academy was considered one of the leading art metropolises in Europe. This was the reason that, as part of a larger international painting milieu, a colony of American painters was in the city and took an active part in the social and sociable activities of the art scene, for example at the festivities of the artists' association Malkasten , which Lewis also owned during the years was a member from 1855 to 1867 with interruptions. Many American painters studied in Düsseldorf in the 1850s, including Albert Bierstadt , George Caleb Bingham , William Henry Furness , James Hart , William Stanley Haseltine , John Beaufain Irving II , Eastman Johnson , Enoch Wood Perry , William Trost Richards , William Dickinson Washington , Charles Wimar and Worthington Whittredge . With many of them he went on sociable trips to romantic areas of the Rhine Province , around June 1854 to the Nahe . Irving, a Düsseldorf student from Charleston, South Carolina, painted a portrait of Lewis around 1856. A focal point of the American painters' colony was the private studio of the German-American history painter Emanuel Leutze , who taught many of his compatriots as private students, including Lewis in 1858. In 1859 he received an offer from Leutze, who moved back to the United States that year, to take over his large furnished house and studio. He accepted this offer and moved in with Maria Jones, who was born in London and with whom he was engaged in 1857 and whom he married in 1859. While Lewis was painting, his wife was in charge of housekeeping and renting out rooms. In 1866 they moved into a large town house at Alexanderstraße 26 (today the Stadtmitte district ), where the childless couple, Lewis' sister-in-law and four house guests lived. Until the beginning of the 1870s, Lewis made good income from the sale of his pictures on the German market and from overseas sales, especially to the United States, but also to Australia, where his wife's brothers, who took over the distribution of his pictures there, had emigrated. In addition to painting, Lewis was also involved in the art trade. So he took over the commission from the Düsseldorf painter Carl Friedrich Lessing to convey his historical painting Jan Hus to a New York art dealer before the Council in Constance (Martyrdom of Hus) .

Served as a consular agent for the United States

After Lewis had applied for the post of consular agent of the United States on the recommendation of William Henry Vesey († 1881), the US consul of Aachen, in the spring of 1867, he was appointed to this post by letter of June 1, 1867. The seat of the consular agency was his town house at Alexanderstraße 26, over whose entrance he hoisted the US flag. Even when the seat of the US consulate moved from Aachen to Barmen in 1869 and from Barmen to Krefeld in 1880, he retained this position, which gave him a high level of social recognition in the social life of Düsseldorf. In addition, the salary he received from the US government compensated for the declining income from the sale of paintings at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War . In 1881 the consular agency was downgraded to a commercial agency. William D. Wamer received the post of commercial agent in Cologne. In 1883, Wamer took up the position of US consul in Düsseldorf. Lewis was only assigned the role of assistant commercial agent, from which he resigned on February 2, 1884.

End of life

Lewis returned to the United States only once; this was in the 1880s when he was attending a family wedding in St. Louis. His eyesight deteriorated with age. He was only able to resume painting after an eye operation. Lewis' house remained a social hub for painters and friends until his wife's death on March 14, 1891. Then it became quieter around him. The Düsseldorfer Zeitung reported his death on September 16, 1904 on September 18, 1904 with a large obituary notice from a local artists' association. Drawing books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings, and more valuable household items, were sent to his nephew Alexander Lewis in St. Louis.

Works (selection)

The Falls of St. Anthony , painting circa 1847
St. Anthony Falls As It Appeared in 1848 (The St. Anthony Falls in 1848) , painting, Düsseldorf 1855
Campfire at night , lithograph as an illustration of the book Das Illustrirte Mississippithal , 1857
Indian village , lithograph from The Illustrated Mississippithal , 1857
  • Western Metropolis , painting, St. Louis, 1846
  • Saint Louis in 1846 , painting, St. Louis, 1846, St. Louis Art Museum
  • Cheever's Mill on the St. Croix River , painting, 1847, Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • The Falls of St. Anthony , painting around 1847, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
  • Lewis' Mammoth Panorama of the Mississippi River (Great National Work) , moving panorama (Cyclorama), St. Louis, 1848/1849
  • Das illustrated Mississippithal (The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated) , picture book with 54 lithographs, Arnz & Comp., Düsseldorf, 1854–1857
  • St. Anthony Falls As It Appeared in 1848 , painting, Düsseldorf 1855, Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • Rhine landscape with castle ruins in the evening light , painting, Düsseldorf 1866
  • Heidelberg , painting, Düsseldorf 1867

literature

  • Lewis, Henry . In: Friedrich von Boetticher : painter works of the nineteenth century. Contribution to art history . Volume I, Dresden 1895, p. 859.
  • Emmanuel Bénézit: Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays . Gründ, Paris 1976, Volume 6, p. 636
  • Bertha L. Heilbron: Making a Motion Picture in 1848. Henry Lewis on the Upper Mississippi . In: Minnesota History. A Quarterly Magazine , Vol. 17, June 1936, Issue 2, pp. 131 ff. ( PDF ).
  • Bertha L. Heilbron: Das illustrated Mississippithal, or, The Valley of the Mississippi . Minnesota Historical Society Press, Saint Paul (Minnesota) 1967, ISBN 978-0-87351-035-6 ( digitized ).
  • Joseph Earl Arrington: Henry Lewis' Moving Panorama of the Mississippi River . In: Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Society , 6.3 (1965), pp. 239-272.

Web links

Commons : Henry Lewis  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For the Eastman couple, see the article Seth and Mary Eastman in the English language Wikipedia.
  2. ^ Lisa Knopp: What the River Carries. Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte . University of Missouri Press, Columbia / Missouri 2012, ISBN 978-0-8262-1974-9 , p. 17 ff.
  3. ^ Sabine Morgen: The broadcast of the Düsseldorf painting school to America in the 19th century. Düsseldorf paintings in America and American painters in Düsseldorf . Göttingen Contributions to Art History, Volume 2, Edition Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-7675-3059-1 , pp. 700 f.
  4. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 435.
  5. ↑ John B. Irving II .: Henry Lewis , photo of the portrait painting owned by the Lewis family, Düsseldorf, around 1856 , image in the portal lincoln.lib.niu.edu , accessed on January 23, 2016.
  6. ↑ Rhine landscape with castle ruins in the evening light , view of the oil painting on the zvab.com portal , accessed on January 23, 2016.
  7. ↑ Heidelberg , Painting, Düsseldorf 1867 , website from an auction result on the artnet.de portal , accessed on January 23, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape and genre painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Newport , Shropshire , England
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1904
Place of death Dusseldorf