The Prince and the Artist A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Karl Bodmer. Not exactly your swashbuckling kind of name. And frankly, you can hardly imagine a more unlikely candidate for the role of artist-explorer-adventurer. Yet this son of a middle class Swiss cotton manufacturer, with no formal artistic training, found himself on the farthest reaches of the upper Missouri River in 1832, in the midst of warring Indian nations, on a treacherous, barely navigable river, recording the landscape and its native inhabitants with a sensitivity and accuracy which has never been equaled in the history of American Art.

So how did this Swiss greenhorn make his way from the Rhine River in Germany, painting picturesque scenes for travel books, to the wilds of the upper Missouri, painting the Bison Dance of the Mandan Indians?

Well, he was noticed by a prince. And not just any prince: Prince Alexander Philip Maxmillian of one of the most esteemed, aristocratic houses in Europe-castle and all.

This was not a prince of the decadent and narcissistic type. This was a man alive to the cultural and scientific life of his time. It was the age of Goethe, the flowering of Romanticism in the arts. He was a Renaissance man, devoted to the arts, but especially drawn to the study of natural history and anthropology.

He had the financial resources and clout to study with the great naturalists of his day. Indeed, this was the age when amateur scientists like Prince Maxmillian led the vanguard of scientific discovery by financing and organizing scientific expeditions into the unexplored and exotic reaches of the world.

Maxmillian got his first taste of exploration when in 1815 he set off for the Brazilian jungles accompanied by two German naturalists. They spent two years collecting specimens, and most importantly, Maxmillian became very interested in native peoples and cultures.

For his next expedition to America in 1832, he wanted an artist with a style who could accurately depict details of the physical culture of native peoples. Despite Karl Bodmer's lack of experience, in this regard, Maxmillian took a risk and invited him to accompany him to North America, as the expedition's official artist.

It was an astute choice. Bodmer had been apprenticed from the age 13 to his uncle, Johann Meier, a prominent Zurick engraver, and studied and worked with him for ten years. By the nature of their craft, engravers are obsessed by detail and accuracy. Because they are working directly on a metal plate, there is no margin for error-they cannot erase their mistakes.

So if you think about it, an artist with a strong background in engraving would have a very disciplined mindset in his approach to work. Simply said, get it right the first time. Combine this, with Bodmer's medium of choice-watercolor-a medium renowned for its immediacy and little margin for error; a medium perfect for the limited time an artist would have at his disposal on an expedition which is constantly on the move-and voila, you have the makings of a perfect, frontier artist.