Leon Pomarede

Leon Pomarede was a painter who worked in St. Louis, Missouri, creating decorative and mural paintings, landscapes, city scenes, religious subjects, portraits, scenes of Native American life, and a panorama of the Mississippi River.

Pomarede was born around 1807 in Tarbes, France. In 1830, Pomarede immigrated to the United States, arriving in New Orleans. There he studied painting with Antoine Mondelli and Louis Dominique Grandjean Develle.

In 1832 Pomarede received a commission to make oil paintings, frescoes, and transparent window paintings for the Old Cathedral in St. Louis. While working on the church, Pomarede also made easel paintings of the church and a painting, View of St. Louis. The painting captures a view from the bank of the Mississippi River at Illinois Town that is considered one of the earliest surviving painted views of a city west of the Mississippi.

Pomarede returned to New Orleans in 1837, and there he made three paintings for the main altar of St. Patrick’s Church. These paintings were the Transfiguration of Christ, St. Patrick Baptizing the Daughters of the King of Ireland and Christ Walking on the Sea of Galilee. In 1839 Pomarede married his mentor’s daughter, Pauline Clemintine Mondelli, and worked with father-in-law Antoine Mondelli to decorate the church of the Ursuline convent in New Orleans. 

In 1843, Pomarede returned to St. Louis, where he settled for the next fifty years. When he arrived, he had a business partnership with T.E. Courtenay, and they advertised themselves as decorative painters. In 1845, Pomarede created  interior murals for the Third Presbyterian Church in St. Louis. Pomarede was commissioned to created murals for many public buildings in St. Louis, including the Mercantile Library in 1854; the Merchants Exchange Building in 1857; the hall at St. Louis University in 1858; fresco paintings for the Southern Relief Fair in St. Louis in 1866; ceiling paintings for the Union Depot train station in St. Louis in 1881; as well as private residences, theaters and churches. The most significant of these commissions was to create murals for the second State Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1856.

Pomarede also created panoramic murals of St. Louis and of the Mississippi River. He is best known for the large-scale panorama depicting life along the Missouri River. In 1848, Pomarede began work on a panorama in partnership with fellow artist Henry Lewis, although after a disagreement Pomarede abandoned the project to start his own panorama independent of Lewis.

In this new endeavor Pomarede was assisted by Charles Wimar and T.E. Courtenay. The panorama depicted the Upper Mississippi in four sections and was designed to be experienced with accompanying music and narration. Titled Pomarede’s Original Panorama of the Mississippi River and Indian Life, it depicted towns along the Mississippi River in sequence, and also included an image of the steamboat Autocrat on the river. The last scenes of the panorama were images of St. Louis before, during and after the fire on May 17, 1849. The panorama may have been eighteen hundred yards long and four yards high. It was first exhibited in St. Louis on September 19, 1849, then it was shown in New Orleans at the Armory Hall from November 1849 to January 13, 1850. The panorama toured to other cities as well, including Mobile, Alabama, New York City, and Newark, New Jersey. In Newark the panorama was destroyed by fire in November 1850. 

Pomarede returned to St. Louis in 1850 and  reopened his studio, where he continued to create various types of paintings. He died at age 85 after a fall from the scaffolding in the church he was decorating in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1892.