Henry Lewis (artist)

"Professor" Henry Lewis (1819–1904) was a British-born, self-taught American artist and showman, best known for his paintings of the American West.[1]

St. Louis in 1846

Life and career

He was born in Newport or Scarborough, Kent County, England, on January 12, 1819.[2] His family immigrated about 1833 to Boston, Massachusetts, where he was apprenticed to a carpenter.[3] At age seventeen, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as a carpenter and scenery painter at the St. Louis Theatre.

Between 1846 and 1848, he sketched and painted hundreds of scenes of the Mississippi River. These included rare views, such as the Mormon Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois (burned 1848), and the great St. Louis Fire of 1849.

He developed his sketches into a giant moving panorama – 12 feet by 1,300 feet – which was unrolled, with music and narration, before theater audiences in the United States and Europe.

He settled in Germany in 1854, and published a book with eighty illustrations based on his panorama: The Illustrated Mississippi: From the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico (1857).[4] He died in 1904 in Düsseldorf, Germany.[5]

"New-Orleans (Louisiana)." Lithograph based on a view from Lewis's moving panorama.

References
  1. "circa-1875 photo of Lewis". Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2013-09-24.
  2. Arrington, Joseph Earl, “Henry Lewis' Moving Panorama of the Mississippi River,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Summer, 1965), p. 239.
  3. Cook, John Graham, “Artist Henry Lewis: The Case of the Falsified Résumé,” Minnesota History, Vol. 57, No. 5 (Spring, 2001), pp. 238-243.
  4. The Illustrated Mississippi (1857)
  5. American Art Annual, Volume 5. MacMillan Company. 1905. pp. 121.
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