View of the Midwest Plains

Download3400 × 2116 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (French, 1834–1904)
Medium: Watercolor, graphite, ink wash, and gouache on paper
Size: Sheet: 13 x 21 cm (5 1/8 x 8 1/4 in.)
Culture: America
Museum: Cleveland Museum of Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

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.