View of the Midwest Plains
1871
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
1871
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
View of the Midwest Plains is a 1871 by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Two riders on horseback cross a wide, flat plain under a pale sky. Distant rock formations rise like low walls in the background. Bartholdi painted this while scouting locations for the Statue of Liberty. He wasn’t just an architect—he carried watercolors to record the land he saw. The quiet scene feels like a quick sketch, not a grand statement. If you like this quiet take on America, look up the subject: america.
French artist Auguste Bartholdi is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty, a gfit from France to the United States in 1886, symbolic of freedom. He also maintained a watercolor practice throughout his career, and created a series of landscapes directly from nature while traveling across the United States in 1871 to identify a potential site for the Statue of Liberty. Here, Bartholdi depicts two figures riding horses before a landscape punctuated by distant buttes, suggesting the freedom he saw as characteristic of the United States.
During his trip across the United States, Bartholdi wrote that “This voyage will probably be a great influence on my entire career, and I am sure that great things will result from it.”
Read the full account in the museum source.
Your cart is empty
Explore artworks →
