Bisontanz [Tableau 18]

by BODMER, Karl

Price: $10,000.00
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Book description: London: Ackermann & Co., c. 1250]. First edition, second state. Aquatint engraving on an oblong folio sheet of Imperial paper. Overall sheet size: 17 1/4 x 24 3/8 inches (438 x 619 mm); image including caption: 16 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches (420 x 545 mm). Hand-painted by a contemporary professional.Professionally glazed and matted in a period-style wooden frame of 25 3/4 x 31 inches (655 x 785 mm). An excellent copy.A beautiful example of one of Bodmer's celebrated suite of eighty-one vignettes and tableaux created for (and after) Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied's Travels in the Interior of North America, characterized by Howes as "the most beautiful, faithful and vivid [work] ever produced depicting western plains and Indians." The accomplished engraving, by Marceau after Bodmer's original, depicts the Bison Dance of the Mandan Indians in front of their Medicine Lodge. In the illustration, one of Bodmer's most well-known, ten Mandan warriors bearing shields, spears, and rifles dance in the foreground while an audience of other Mandans beat drums and look on from bluffs in the background. Eight of the warriors are wearing headpieces adorned with buffalo horns; two are wearing entire buffalo heads.As Ruud notes of this print, "The first state is extremely rare; only two examples are known and perhaps only three were ever created" (p. 137).In 1832 Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian (1782-1867) of Neuwied, Prussia, a distinguished naturalist, journeyed to the American West in what was to become one of the earliest natural history expeditions in the region. Accompanying him was Swiss-born artist Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), who produced hundreds of natural history, ethnographic, and landscape illustrations of their journey. From 1834 to 1843, Bodmer and a team of engravers and printers produced thirty-three plates for chapter vignettes of Maximilian's account, and also forty-eight folio-sized tableaux that were issued separately, colored and uncolored on different paper stocks, and in various states and languages."In their dance they [the Ber—ck-îchatŠ or 'Buffalo Society'] wear the skin of the upper part of the head and the mane of the buffalo, with its horns on their heads; but two select individuals, the bravest of all, who thenceforward never dare to flee from the enemy, wear a perfect imitation of the buffalo's head, with the horns, which they set on their heads, and in which there are holes left for the eyes, which are surrounded with an iron or tin ring. ... Towards evening, nine men of the 'Buffalo Bulls' came to the fort to perform their dance, discharging their guns immediately upon entering. Only one of them wore the entire buffalo head; the others had pieces of the skin of the forehead, a couple of fillets of red cloth, their shields decorated with the same material, and an appendage of feathers, intended to represent the bull's tail, hanging down their backs. They likewise carried long, elegantly ornamented banners in their hands" (from Evan Lloyd's original 1843 translation of Maximilian's diary, reprinted in the Taschen edition of Travels in the Interior of North America (New York: 2001), pp. 93-94).Graff 4648. Howes M443a. Ruud, Karl Bodmer's North American Prints, pp. 134-138. Sabin 47014.

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