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View on the Upper Mississippi, Beautiful Prairie Bluffs
George Catlin (born Wilkes-Barre, PA 1796-died Jersey City, NJ 1872)
1835-1836
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 19 5/8 x 27 5/8 in. (49.8 x 70.1 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
George Catlin probably sketched most of the Upper Mississippi River landscapes on his canoe trip from the Falls of St. Anthony to Dubuque in 1835. He mentions frequently that he used pencil and paper to record certain views, and a sketchbook now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum must have been one that he was carrying at the time. Several consecutive pages of pencil drawings in the SAAM sketchbook are of towns, forts, and scenery observed along the river that reappear, in somewhat modified form, in Upper Mississippi paintings. (Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)
