Charles “Carl” Ferdinand Wimar (1828–1862)

In his St. Louis studio, Charles “Carl” Ferdinand Wimar painted the Missouri River frontier in the final decade prior to the Civil War. A native German, he participated in the first wave of mass German immigration to Missouri in the 1830s. He joined a generation of artist-explorers, including Peter Rindisbacher, George C. Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and Charles Deas, who worked from St. Louis as their base of operations and established the city as a center for western artists during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Among these artists, Wimar’s depictions of the life and landscape of the Missouri River frontier stand as important documents of the territory and Native cultures prior to the dramatic transformation that occurred during the mass settlement of the trans-Mississippi West after the Civil War.

Wimar spent his youth in Germany during a difficult era. He was born on February 19, 1828, in Siegburg, Germany (near Bonn), to a scrivener, Ludwig Gottfried Wimar, and a washerwoman, Elizabeth Schmitz. His father died soon after his birth, and his mother supported the family until she married a merchant named Matthias Becker and moved the family to Cologne in 1835. At this time many Germans experienced economic hardships and political repression, resulting in the first major wave of German immigration to the United States. Many of the German newcomers were influenced by popular guides published by Gottfried Duden, and Duden evidently inspired Becker, who appeared to follow the author’s advice “to travel directly to Saint Louis on the Mississippi” in 1839. In St. Louis, Becker opened a public house. By 1844, once his business was established, his family joined him.

During this period numerous German artists, scientists, and authors expressed a fascination with the American West. The German appetite for the romantic American West was stoked by the immensely popular literary genre Wildwestgeschichten (Wild West stories). Arriving in St. Louis at the age of fifteen, Wimar found himself on the edge of the frontier that had been mythologized by the German literature with which he was probably familiar. The oral history of his youth relates the young Wimar’s enchantment with Native Americans, who camped next to his stepfather’s public house during trade missions. Early biographers relate the family tradition that the young German boy was befriended by an Indigenous man who taught him about Native American lifestyle, culture, and customs.

Demonstrating a talent for drawing as a youth, Wimar was apprenticed to a local house and steamboat painter shortly after his arrival from Germany. He expressed dissatisfaction with the painting trade and switched to the studio of the French émigré Leon Pomarede, a local painter and decorator, by 1846. During his apprenticeship, Wimar assisted Pomarede in the creation of his monumental Mississippi River panorama, Portrait of the Father of the Waters (1849). He accompanied his teacher on sketching trips up the Mississippi River in preparation for the panorama. William Tod Helmuth wrote that it was on one of these excursions that Wimar realized his lifework, when Pomarede advised him to adopt frontier subject matter in his art and “follow it exclusively, as through it [Wimar] might achieve a reputation that, in years to come when the Indians would be a ‘race clean gone,’ would increase to a peculiar brightness, not only in this country but on the continent.”

Around 1850 Wimar left Pomarede and embarked on his first professional venture as an artist, opening a business with a partner that he advertised in the St. Louis Directory as “Wimar and Boneau, painters.” Little is known about this partnership, but Wimar’s surviving paintings from this period suggest that he painted primarily portraits and a few genre subjects. The most interesting of these surviving paintings is the dramatic Three Children Attacked by a Wolf (ca. 1851), in which he creatively adapted Thomas Gainsborough’s Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting to a frontier subject with an aggressive wolf threatening children.

At this time Wimar’s artistic ambitions were motivated by the success of fellow German American Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Unveiled to the American public in November 1851, the painting was hailed by critics as the most important American history painting ever created. Proclaiming that the work “surpasses everything I have ever seen before,” Wimar decided to follow Leutze’s career path of painting the history of his adopted country. In December 1851 he departed for Germany to study with Leutze in Düsseldorf.

After a Rhine tour and a reunion with family members, Wimar arrived in spring 1851 in Düsseldorf, where he would spend the next four years learning the German academic painting style and applying it to American frontier subjects. Because of his chosen subject and his appearance, Wimar earned the appellation “the Indian painter” from his German colleagues. In his student years his paintings focused on images of conflict and confrontation between Native Americans and the Euro-American colonizers, drawn largely from popular literature of the day. His first major painting, The Abduction of Daniel Boone’s Daughter by the Indians (1855–1856), exemplifies Wimar’s fascination with dramatic frontier subjects, with the terrified Jemima Boone kneeling in her canoe, praying for mercy. By contrasting the “civil” white woman posed as a saint kneeling in prayer to the “heathen” Natives, Wimar emphasized the prevailing Anglo-European belief in the moral superiority of the Euro-Americans and exploited the traditional captivity narrative type of the “savage” Native American.

During his fourth year Wimar created the consummate painting of his Düsseldorf period, The Attack on an Emigrant Train (1856). Inspired by a French author of Wild West stories, Gabriel Ferry, Wimar appropriated a fictitious tale of Indians attacking a wagon train to compose a tableau portraying the heroic attempts of Native Americans to repel the settlers’ inevitable progress across the frontier. Wimar’s novel conception of the wagon-train attack provided the prototype for subsequent images copied from Wimar’s 1860 lithograph (drafted by Leopold Grozelier) of the painting that enjoyed mass distribution.

The academic method that Wimar learned in Düsseldorf emphasized drawing directly from nature. He realized that his epic paintings of the American West were informed by popular literature and not direct observation. Following the completion of The Attack on an Emigrant Train he traveled to St. Louis, determined to explore the Missouri River frontier “to collect the necessary studies,” with the intention to then return to Düsseldorf to paint grand history paintings of the American West.

The painter arrived in St. Louis during the winter of 1856–1857 but was initially unsuccessful in securing passage on one of the steamboats traveling up the Missouri into Native American territory. Finally, in the summers of 1858 and 1859, Wimar received permission to accompany government-sponsored expeditions to deliver annuities to the Indigenous tribes along the river and to explore the upper reaches of the Missouri River. On these expeditions Wimar recorded the exciting experiences that he witnessed in his encounters with the Native cultures and sketched the dramatic, distinctive natural formations that he discovered on the upper Missouri.

Back in his St. Louis studio, Wimar created an extraordinary series of panoramic Missouri River paintings that drew from his storehouse of memorable experiences reinforced by the wealth of sketches that he produced and artifacts that he collected. In these paintings he abandoned his obsession with images of conflict and confrontation and demonstrated his new romantic appreciation for what he perceived was the quickly passing life, land, and culture of the Native inhabitants of the Plains. Within the broad panoramic format of these paintings, Wimar combined his nostalgic vision of the West with realistic depictions of the landscape and Native Americans.

Wimar’s panoramic paintings of the frontier established his artistic reputation and commercial success. The Buffalo Hunt (1861) marked the pinnacle of his career. The painting presents a dynamic and ethnographically accurate portrayal of two Sioux men on horseback hunting buffalo. Wimar entered this painting in the Western Academy of Art’s first, and only, exhibition, where it earned popular accolades and the attention of the English Lord Lyons, who, while traveling with the entourage of the Prince of Wales, commissioned a copy. Like The Attack on an Emigrant Train, Wimar’s The Buffalo Hunt is a seminal image of this subject that introduced the metaphors of death through the grave-like stone and, in his later versions, skulls to convey the demise of the Native Americans as well as the buffalo.

The success of The Buffalo Hunt motivated a group of St. Louis civic leaders to award Wimar, in partnership with his half-brother, August Becker, a commission, the largest of his career, to decorate the dome of the St. Louis Courthouse with murals. Wimar drew upon his academic training to design a complex mural scheme that presented events in St. Louis’s history and its ambitions for the future of the city as the gateway to the West. St. Louis civic leaders envisioned their dome in rivalry with the murals for the US Capitol in Washington, DC, and planned its completion to precede those in Washington. They aspired to position St. Louis as the western counterpart and parallel to the nation’s capital.

Above two levels of portraits of historically significant St. Louisans, Wimar composed the epic centerpiece for his mural scheme on four lunettes at the cardinal points, presenting DeSoto Discovering the Mississippi (south), The Landing of Laclede (east), The Year of the Blow (north), and Westward the Star of Empire (west). The three early scenes depict moments in history when the Spanish first claimed the Mississippi, the French founded St. Louis, and the settlers defeated British-incited Native Americans in the Battle of St. Louis during the American Revolution. The culminating image in the western lunette depicts the Cochetopa Pass in Colorado through which the transcontinental railroad would have passed if Congress had chosen the central route through St. Louis for the railroad. Unfortunately for the city, Congress selected the northern route through Chicago only months before Wimar’s mural was completed, dashing St. Louis’s ambitions for the national transportation thoroughfare.

During the year that Wimar painted the courthouse murals, he struggled to complete the commission. A frail man, he suffered from tuberculosis. Journalists of the day reported that his advanced condition required his assistants to carry him up to the scaffolds to execute the work. Yet he managed to complete the ambitious mural project before succumbing to his illness on November 28, 1862.

Wimar’s civic legacy, the courthouse murals, preserved the important moments in early St. Louis history and the grandiose civic aspiration of the civic leaders at this crucial transition point in American history. In his brief career Wimar created compelling images of the American West, some of which still define our conception of such events as wagon-train attacks and buffalo hunts. His death at the young age of thirty-four occurred at the close of an era in American art and history precipitated by the Civil War. The subsequent course of history also closed the door on an era of artist-explorers who used St. Louis as their home base. Wimar’s paintings stand among the final images of the Missouri River frontier prior to mass settlement following the Civil War.