Karl Ferdinand Wimar
Karl Ferdinand Wimar (born 20 February 1828 in Siegburg as Karl Ferdinand Weimer, 28 November 1862 in St. Louis, Missouri) , was a German-American painter from the Dusseldorf School. Karl Ferdinand Wimar concentrated on Native Americans in the West and the great herds of buffalo.
He is known for an early painting of a colonial incident: his The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians, a depiction of the 1776 capture near Boonesborough, Kentucky of Jemima Boone and two other girls by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party.
Born in Siegburg, Germany, Charles Wimar emigrated to the United States in 1843 at the age of 15 with his family at the age of 15 and settled down in St. Louis, a border town and center of the American fur trade.
In 1846 he began studying painting with Leon Pomarede. Together they traveled up the Mississippi River. In 1852 he went to the Düsseldorf Academy to study with Emanuel Leutze. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
An inheritance enabled him to go to Düsseldorf in 1852 to study art. Wimar received private lessons from Joseph Fay and Emanuel Leutze, the latter like a German American. 23 Wimar alone produced 23 paintings in Düsseldorf, especially depictions of conflicts of American settlers with Indians, which were exhibited with great success in Elberfeld, Hanover, Cologne and St. Louis. In order to be able to depict the Indians as faithfully as possible, he had his clothes and paraphernalia sent by his parents from Missouri.
In 1853 he created the first version of the painting The Abduction of Daniel Boone’s Daughter by Indians, in which he processed an event from 1776.
In 1855 he repeated the motif. In September 1854, Wimar moved into a studio in the house of Oswald Achenbach, where Worthington Whittredge, Henry Lewis, Joseph Fay and Emanuel Leutze also worked. As a member of the artist Malkasten, Wimar was involved in the social life of Düsseldorf painters; In an artist’s production of “Operagout” Pannemann’s Dream, he played the national allegory America.
Wimar returned to St. Louis in 1856. About this time, he painted a notable incident from the colonial era, The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians (1855-1856). It was one of his first works to achieve notice in the United States. A recent exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum described the painting as showing five Indians and Jemima in a canoe, each wondering when rescuers would come for her.
Wimar primarily painted the themes of Indian life on the Great Plains, showing the Native American hunts of buffalo and other activities related to their nomadic lives. He also painted scenes of the emigrant wagon trains that carried pioneer settlers across the western expanses.
He made two long trips in 1858 and 1859 up the Missouri River, and was inspired by his experiences and observations of Native American life. He also traveled up the Mississippi.
His works are regarded as important exhibits of the City Art Museum in St. Louis. His œuvre is particularly important because of the ethnographic interest in the Indians. Wimar is regarded as the forerunner of painters such as Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, who also placed the life and landscapes of the Wild West at the center of their painting.
Among Wimar’s most well-known works were murals painted in 1861 in the Rotunda of the St. Louis Court House. The building is now part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.