Charles Ferdinand Wimar

Charles Ferdinand Wimar was one of the many artist-explorers who were based in St. Louis, Missouri, including Karl Bodmer, George Catlin and Peter Rindisbacher during the mid-nineteenth century. His short career was distinguished by his depictions of Native Americans and the natural world that he encountered during his travels along the Mississippi River.

In 1844, Wimar and his family immigrated from Germany to St. Louis to join his stepfather, who had established a public house. Native American traders would camp by the public house to trade with representatives of the American Fur Company. Shortly after his arrival in St. Louis, Wimar was apprenticed to a steamboat painting company and later the studio of Leon Pomarede, a panorama painter and artist. In 1849, Wimar accompanied Pomarede on a trip along the Mississippi and helped paint the panorama, Portrait of the Father of the Waters, which was unveiled to the public on September 19, 1849, in St. Louis.

Wimar was fascinated by his encounters with Native Americans and with the landscapes of the West, and although he returned shortly to St. Louis to work at portrait painting with Edward Boneau, on the advice of Pomarede he decided to continue his studies so he could focus on painting the American West.

In 1851 he returned to Germany to attend the Düsseldorf Academy, following in the footsteps of other successful German-American artists and studying with Josef Fay, Oswald Achenbach and Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and classmate Albert Bierstadt. During his studies, from 1852 to 1856, Wimar made images of indigenous peoples and frontier life, which he sent back to St. Louis. These paintings relied on popular fictionalized tropes that depicted Native Americans as the aggressive savages, as in his 1862 painting The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians.

In the winter of 1856-1857, Wimar returned to America and discovered that the Native Americans had been moved further west. He ventured into their lands through traveling on the Mississippi, Missouri and Yellowstone rivers with the American Fur Trading Company to gather images for his paintings. During his travels, Wimar sketched and photographed indigenous peoples, buffalo, and the landscape. Like Caitlin and Bierstadt, Wimar’s paintings of Native Americans during the 1850s begin to acknowledge a dying way of life, culture and people.

In 1860 he painted The Buffalo Hunt, for the opening of the Western Academy of Art in St. Louis, and included in the foreground a stone marker that resembles a grave marker. In his 1861 version of the painting, this symbol was replaced with an even more explicit skull and bones.

In 1857, St. Louis photographer John H. Fitzgibbon commissioned Wimar and two assistants to create a painted panorama of Kansas from daguerreotypes Fitzgibbon had made. This panorama, titled Fitzgibbon’s Panorama of Kansas and the Indian Nations, was a depiction of the Border War in Kansas, and included scenes of the Upper Missouri River. The panorama traveled to New England, where it was presented in Boston with much fanfare.

In 1861 Wimar, along with his half-brother August Becker, received the commission to create painted mural decorations for the rotunda of the St. Louis Courthouse. Wimar was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis when he did this commission and had to be carried to the scaffold where a couch was placed so he could rest periodically. It is said that he did most of the painting while on the couch. Shortly after the commission was completed, he died and is interred in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.