Bodmer_Publication

With but a few exceptions Schinz’s lithographs are all laterally reversed; this
is due to the faster, and therefore cheaper, work method applied by the lithographers,
where the image is transferred to the limestone true to side so that the print
appears laterally reversed.
Altered Perception
Since Schinz’s works found outlet as textbooks in schools and universities they
received much wider attention than Prince Maximilian’s expensive travel journal
that only rich citizens, aristocratic families and major libraries could afford to
purchase. Especially the third edition of 1845, which included extracts from Prince
Maximilian’s travel diary on thirteen large-sized pages in close type and seven
prints after Bodmer’s originals, became something like the “popular edition” of
Wied’s journal. Schinz granted no other explorer the space and attention he gave
to his friend Maximilian; this resulted in Wied’s work becoming well known in
teaching institutions and among scholars who otherwise had little or no access
to the original edition of the Prince’s journal. Up to this day, the third edition of
Schinz’s work is the one most commonly held in university libraries in Germanspeaking
countries.
Thus it is safe to say that Schinz played a significant role in transforming the
image of the North American Indian in Germany and other European countries.
Just as in the successive editions of his Natural History, pictures of Native Americans
from the Eastern Woodlands and the Northwest Coast began to disappear also
from other, more popular publications, clearing the field for the Indians of the
Great Plains and Prairies. These had, up to then, been far less affected and
c orrupted by white civilization and therefore served ideally as models for the image
of the noble savage. The majestic and dignified figures that Bodmer captured
in his watercolors still fascinate European and American audiences; they are
viewed as the expression of an alleged bygone, forever-lost golden age. Especially
in the United States Bodmer’s watercolors and the aquatints produced from them
rank as icons of a lost paradise which was, in fact, destroyed willfully but which
lives on through Bodmer’s visual representations.
In his study The Emergence of the Plains Indian as a Symbol of the North American
Indian the American anthropologist John Ewers noted the influence that
George Catlin and Karl Bodmer had on the formation of a popular image of the
North American Indian: „Together the works of Catlin and Maximilian-Bodmer,
appearing almost simultaneously, greatly stimulated popular interest in the Plains
Indians in this country and abroad and had a strong influence on the work of many
other artists.” 28
Many ethnographic monographs and popular books from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries include illustrations – in every imaginable variation and
combination – based on Bodmer’s original sketches and watercolors, but they
never come up to the quality of the prints produced by J. Honegger’s lithographic
printing office in Zurich for the three editions of Schinz’s Natural History
published after 1835. As these works were, and still are, practically unknown in the
United States, Brandon Ruud unfortunately did not get the ascriptions of the
Schinz- lithographs right in his otherwise marvellous work on the Bodmer prints.
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