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View of the Midwest Plains
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
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.
Cleveland Museum of Art’s own descriptionCredit lineView of the Midwest Plains, c. 1871. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (French, 1834–1904). Watercolor, graphite, ink wash, and gouache on paper; sheet: 13 x 21 cm (5 1/8 x 8 1/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, James Parmelee Fund, 2025.146
