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from Auction House Records.
A Dog Cariole only used in winter by Canadian Indians
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  An early specialist in watercolor scenes of frontier life, Peter
Rindisbacher is credited as being "the first pioneer artist
recording genre of Western Indians". (Samuels, 400).
He was born in Upper Emmenthal, Canton Bern in Switzerland in 1806, and
received some art training before moving in 1821 with his family to
western Canada where they joined a colony on the Red River
settled by the Earl of Selkirk. Along the way during the trip,
Rindisbacher sketched scenes including landscapes, icebergs and Eskimos.
During the five years he lived in the frontier settlement, he helped to
support his family by the sale of drawings and watercolors, which
depicted frontier life. About 1822-23, the colony's governor,
Andrew Bulger, asked him to sketch scenes of some of the British forts
in the area, and these works brought him attention in England where
some of the scenes were lithographed.
The Rindisbachers moved south into Wisconsin to Gratiot's Grove in
1826, having been driven out of Canada by severe weather and other
trying circumstances, and in 1829 they settled in St. Louis, Missouri
where Peter did magazine illustrations of western scenes for The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine.
In 1829, just before the move to St. Louis, Caleb Atwater, Indian
Commissioner, hired him to record the Indian treating gathering with
white men in Wisconsin at Prairie du Chien.
Peter Rindisbacher died in 1834 at age twenty-eight just when he was gaining national attention for his work.
One of his Canadian paintings, a watercolor, is titled Extremely Tiring Trails on the Portages,
and depicts very rough hill country. "Portage" refers to the physical
carrying of boats and all supplies between the lakes and rivers used by
the fur traders in the early days of the Canadian fur trade, when there
were no real roads for travelling.
Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. has written The Artist was a Young Man: The Life Story of Peter Rindisbacher,
published by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, in 1970. It is
one of the few books on Rindisbacher, and the only one in English. It
is an excellent summary and beautifully illustrated with Rindisbacher's
works.
Sources include:
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
http://www.germanheritage.com/biographies/mtoz/rindisbacher.html
http://www.ucdp.uc.edu/exhibits/mckhall/bibliography.html
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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