The Falls of St. Anthony

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The Falls of St. Anthony
Bierstadt Albert The Falls of St. Anthony.jpg
Artist Albert Bierstadt
Year1880 (1880)
MediumOil on canvas
Movement Hudson River School
Subject Saint Anthony Falls
Dimensions96.8 cm× 153.7 cm(38.1 in× 60.5 in)
Location Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
Owner Carmen Cervera

The Falls of St. Anthony is an 1880 oil landscape painting by the Hudson River School artist Albert Bierstadt.

Saint Anthony Falls, located on the Mississippi River next to what is now downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, [1] was the only major waterfall on the Mississippi River until its replacement by locks and dams in the early 20th century. [2] Rather than depict the falls with the spillway, Bierstadt depicted them as they appeared prior to human interference. The painting depicts in its foreground several Native Americans, and a hatted figure with a walking stick, speculated to be Louis Hennepin, discoverer of the falls. [3]

Along with Yosemite Valley, Saint Anthony Falls held a particular attraction for painters of 19th-century landscapes, including Bierstadt. [4] The falls were a popular tourist attraction at the time and were depicted in many paintings, including works by Bierstadt, Henry Lewis, and George Catlin. [5]

Bierstadt's painting is based on Henry Lewis' earlier 1847 work The Falls of Saint Anthony, Upper Mississippi, and has been called "a romantic vision of a by-then-long-destroyed falls", which was compromised by the industrialization and growth of the surrounding city of Minneapolis. Like Lewis' work, Bierstadt's painting is an image of the falls before the construction of a dam in 1848 caused a disastrous collapse of the waterfall's main ledge in 1869. [1] Bierstadt may have exaggerated the scale of the falls in his version for dramatic effect, making them seem as large as Niagara Falls. [6] He may have done this to add spiritual and philosophical dimension to the painting. By contrast, Catlin's earlier depiction is more accurate. [7]

The painting has been praised as one of Bierstadt's finest. Art historian Victor Koshkin-Youritzin said that the painting "contains many of the themes spiritually significant to 19th-century audiences—for example, suggestions of the far off, the arduous journey, and the magnificent natural splendors of the virgin wilderness." [8] Historian Paul Schneider said that the painting "shows the 600-yard-wide cascade as a panoramic shift in the crust of the earth, bathed in the painter's romantic evening light." [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint Anthony Falls</span> Waterfall in Mississippi River into the Mississippi River Gorge in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Saint Anthony Falls, or the Falls of Saint Anthony, located at the northeastern edge of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the only natural major waterfall on the Mississippi River. Throughout the mid-to-late 1800s, various dams were built atop the east and west faces of the falls to support the milling industry that spurred the growth of the city of Minneapolis. In 1880, the central face of the falls was reinforced with a sloping timber apron to stop the upstream erosion of the falls. In the 1950s, the apron was rebuilt with concrete, which makes up the most visible portion of the falls today. A series of locks were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s to extend navigation to points upstream.

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George Catlin was an American lawyer, painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the American frontier. Traveling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin wrote about and painted portraits that depicted the life of the Plains Indians. His early work included engravings, drawn from nature, of sites along the route of the Erie Canal in New York State. Several of his renderings were published in one of the first printed books to use lithography, Cadwallader D. Colden's Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals, published in 1825, with early images of the City of Buffalo.

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Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Hennepin</span> Belgian explorer and missionary

Louis Hennepin, OFM was a Belgian Catholic priest and missionary best known for his activities in North America. A member of the Recollects, a minor branch of the Franciscans, he travelled to New France and proselytised to several Native American tribes.

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Charles Marion Russell, also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell, was an American artist of the American Old West. He created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Native Americans, and landscapes set in the western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. He is known as "the cowboy artist" and was also a storyteller and author. He became an advocate for Native Americans in the west, supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana. In 1916, Congress passed legislation to create the Rocky Boy Reservation.

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The Stone Arch Bridge is a former railroad bridge crossing the Mississippi River at Saint Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the only arched bridge made of stone on the entire Mississippi River. It is the second oldest bridge on the river next to Eads Bridge. The bridge was built to connect the railway system to the new Union Depot, which at that time was planned to be built between Hennepin Avenue and Nicollet Avenue. The bridge was completed in 1883, costing $650,000 at the time. 117 Portland Avenue is the general address of the historic complex.

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Minnehaha Park is a city park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, and home to Minnehaha Falls and the lower reaches of Minnehaha Creek. Officially named Minnehaha Regional Park, it is part of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board system and lies within the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service. The park was designed by landscape architect Horace W.S. Cleveland in 1883 as part of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway system, and was part of the popular steamboat Upper Mississippi River "Fashionable Tour" in the 1800s.

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Nicollet Island is an island in the Mississippi River just north of Saint Anthony Falls in central Minneapolis, Minnesota. According to the United States Census Bureau the island has a land area of 194,407 square metres (0.075 sq mi) and a 2000 census population of 144 persons. The island makes up a large part of the city-designated Nicollet Island/East Bank neighborhood. The island is named for cartographer Joseph Nicollet, who mapped the Upper Mississippi in the 1830s.

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Saint Anthony Main is an stretch of buildings on Main Street across from Saint Anthony Falls in the Marcy-Holmes and Nicollet Island/East Bank neighborhoods of Minneapolis. The area is part of Southeast, Minneapolis, as it was originally the Main Street through the township of St. Anthony, Minnesota prior to most of that township's annexation in 1872. It opened as a festival marketplace in the 1980s.

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The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area is a 72-mile (116 km) and 54,000-acre (22,000 ha) protected corridor along the Mississippi River through Minneapolis–Saint Paul in the U.S. state of Minnesota, from the cities of Dayton and Ramsey to just downstream of Hastings. This stretch of the upper Mississippi River includes natural, historical, recreational, cultural, scenic, scientific, and economic resources of national significance. This area is the only national park site dedicated exclusively to the Mississippi River. The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area is sometimes abbreviated as MNRRA or MISS, the four-letter code the National Park Service assigned to the area. The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area is classified as one of four national rivers in the United States, and despite its name is technically not one of the 40 national recreation areas.

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