View of St. Louis from the Bluffs at Carondelet
View of St. Louis from the Bluffs
at Carondelet
Paulus Roetter, ca. 1835
Oil on canvas
MHS Collections
Gift of Mrs. D. E. Kittridge
Limitless dusky skies, expansive fields of fertile greenery, abundant and clear waterways, men and women who seamlessly blend into the picturesque landscape—for westward gazing nineteenth-century Americans this idyllic vision symbolized absolute freedom and inspired the artistic tradition of romantic landscape painting.
Paulus Roetter, a noted St. Louisan who had emigrated from Germany, was one such landscape artist. Through his creations Roetter and other renowned German painters like Charles Wimar and Albert Bierstadt encouraged future European immigrants to seek out these bountiful vistas thought to make up the American west. For those who would brave the voyage and attempt to settle in these territories, however, the challenging and unfriendly environments they encountered often failed to match this imaginative vision—making western landscape imagery a complicated icon of American freedom.
Organized by the Virginia Historical
Society with additional support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter
Foundation and the
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Changing Exhibitions Fund, American. Support
in St. Louis is provided by The Stanley and Lucy Lopata Foundation
This exhibition has been made possible in part
by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Great Ideas Brought to Life.
