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"Professor" Henry Lewis (1819–1904) was a British-born, self-taught American artist and showman, best known for his paintings of the American West.
Henry Lewis (1819-1904)
from AskArt.
€”includes a discussion of Lewis and his book ''Das Illustrirte Mississippithal'', a slide show of illustrations from the book, and a downloadable pdf of the book. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lewis, Henry 1819 births 1904 deaths 19th-century American painters 19th-century American male artists American male painters Artists from St. Louis
"Professor" Henry Lewis (1819–1904) was a British-born, self-taught American artist and showman, best known for his paintings of the American West.
Life and career
Lewis was born inNewport, Wales
Newport ( cy, Casnewydd; ) is a city and county borough in Wales, situated on the River Usk close to its confluence with the Severn Estuary, northeast of Cardiff. With a population of 145,700 at the 2011 census, Newport is the third-largest a ...
or Scarborough Scarborough or Scarboro may refer to:
People
* Scarborough (surname)
* Earl of Scarbrough
Places Australia
* Scarborough, Western Australia, suburb of Perth
* Scarborough, New South Wales, suburb of Wollongong
* Scarborough, Queensland, su ...
, North Riding of Yorkshire, England, on January 12, 1819, according to Joseph Earl Arrington. John Graham Cooke casts doubt on Lewis's precise birthplace, but mentions Shropshire
Shropshire (; alternatively Salop; abbreviated in print only as Shrops; demonym Salopian ) is a landlocked historic county in the West Midlands region of England. It is bordered by Wales to the west and the English counties of Cheshire to ...
, England, as a possible birthplace, in that Lewis's father came from there.
Lewis's family immigrated about 1833 to Boston, Massachusetts, where he was apprenticed to a carpenter. At age seventeen, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
, where he worked as a carpenter and scenery painter at the St. Louis Theatre.
Between 1846 and 1848, Lewis sketched and painted hundreds of scenes of the Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it fl ...
. These included rare views, such as the Mormon Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois (burned 1848), and the great St. Louis Fire of 1849.
Lewis developed his sketches into a giant moving panorama
The moving panorama was an innovation on panoramic painting in the mid-nineteenth century. It was among the most popular forms of entertainment in the world, with hundreds of panoramas constantly on tour in the United Kingdom, the United States, a ...
– 12 feet by 1,300 feet – which was unrolled, with music and narration, before theater audiences in the United States and Europe.
Lewis settled in Germany in 1854, and published a book with eighty illustrations based on his panorama: ''The Illustrated Mississippi: From the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico'' (1857). He died in 1904 in Düsseldorf, Germany.
References
External links
Henry Lewis (1819-1904)
from AskArt.
€”includes a discussion of Lewis and his book ''Das Illustrirte Mississippithal'', a slide show of illustrations from the book, and a downloadable pdf of the book. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lewis, Henry 1819 births 1904 deaths 19th-century American painters 19th-century American male artists American male painters Artists from St. Louis