Bodmer_Publication

Prince Maximilian’s North American
Collection in Berlin
Peter Bolz
The German natural scientist Prince Maximilian of Wied returned from his
journeys in North America, on which he had been accompanied by the artist Karl
Bodmer and the huntsman David Dreidoppel, with a rich collection of scientific
and artistic material. Next to Bodmer’s approximately 400 watercolors, the Prince
brought back with him a natural scientific collection and around 150 ethnological
objects, most of them from the upper reaches of the Missouri River. He kept the
collections in a side-wing of the castle in Neuwied where he used them for his
scientific studies, but above all when preparing the publication of his travel journal.
Tableaux 21 and 48 in the famous aquatint atlas show a total of thirty- four
American Indian objects; most of them belonged to the Prince’s collection.
By 1843 the Prince’s journal had been fully published, with publication costs
running at 24,000 thalers, but with returns on sale covering only a very small part
of the expenses. After publication, the Prince seems to have turned attention back
to his natural historical interests and collections, because in 1844 he offered Georg
August Goldfuss, professor for zoology, mineralogy and paleontology in Bonn, who
had assisted him in preparing his travel journal for publication, a part of his
ethnological collection for sale. Goldfuss, however, did not have the necessary
funds and had to turn the offer down, but in March 1844 he sent a letter to the general
director of the Royal Museums in Berlin, Ignaz von Olfers, offering him the
collection for sale. The price was set at 125 thalers, which was, according to Goldfuss,
half the amount Prince Maximilian had originally paid for the objects.
Olfers passed the matter on to Leopold von Ledebur, Director of the Royal Prussian
Art Chamber, who immediately contacted the management of the Cabinet of
Natural History at the castle in Neuwied. Due to the bargain price, but certainly
also because of Prince Maximilian’s reputation among scholars in Germany as
a distinguished natural scientist and ethnologist, Ledebur agreed to the price
without hesitating and asked for the collection to be shipped to Berlin. He received
a reply from the manager of the Cabinet of Natural History, but it seems that
Ledebur never corresponded directly with Prince Maximilian. The collection
a rrived in Berlin in July 1844. As some of the pieces had suffered damage, the
purchasing price was in the end set at 121 thalers.
The collection comprised forty-seven single items or pairs of objects. Certainly
the largest and most significant group of objects were the painted or quill-decorated
buffalo robes, eleven of which were sent to Berlin in 1844. In 1939 one of the
robes, was given to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa in an exchange
deal, another found its way to the Deutsches Ledermuseum (German Leather
Museum) in Offenbach in 1950 through the hands of the collector and art dealer
Arthur Speyer. Due to their good condition and the superb painting on some of
them these robes belong worldwide to the most significant collections of pictographic
representations of Native Americans of the Great Plains and Prairies.
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