Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State

United States of America flag

Web Property of the U.S. Department of State

Prairie Bluffs at Julesburg South Platte, Storm at Sunset

Home / Explore The Collection
Close

Object Details

Maker
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (German, active United States 1816-1868)
Date
1863
Geography
Unknown
Culture
German
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
Overall: 18 in x 48 in; 45.72 cm x 121.92 cm
Provenance
Edward Sintzenich, Auctioneer, New York, New York, May 7, 1863, Lot 18; Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Tchertoff, of Paris, France, by 1971; to the Fine Arts Committee through purchase[1] Notes: 1.Catalogue of a Valuable Collection of Oil Paintings Comprising the Most Recent and Important Works of E. Leutze, Esq. (New York: May 7, 1863). Described in the New York Times for May 2, 1863. Purchased in a flea market in Paris by Mr. and Mrs. Tchertoff. Raymond L. Stehle, "Five Sketchbooks of Emanuel Leutze" in The Art Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 21, no. 2 (April 1964), in litteris, identified the painting as no. 18 (with Leutze's own title) in the Sintzenich auction, and added that, upon the drawing of state boundaries, Julesburg became Julesburg, Colorado, in the northeast corner of the state (April 21, 1973; Curatorial Files, Department of State).
Inscriptions
Signed and dated at the lower left, "E Leutze, 1863."
Credit Line
Funds donated by The Honorable John McCone and Mrs. McCone
Collection
The Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.
Accession Number
RR-1972.0131

Object Essay

This unusual painting is the one work directly inspired by Emanuel Leutze’s only trip to the Far West (1861–1862), a trip occasioned by the commission he had received for a major decoration in the new wing for the House of Representatives. This enormous mural, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1862), an allegory of continental expansion and Manifest Destiny, was the most significant commission the artist had received, and he wanted to experience the landscape before undertaking it.1Groseclose, 60, 67, nos. 69 and 97, no. 104 (illus.). Stehle, 86, posits an earlier undocumented trip west, “probably in the summer of 1860.”

Although Leutze painted several other Indian scenes in the years soon after his visit, they do not render the landscape or figures in a specific way but reflect standard academic models. The Collection’s painting, Prairie Bluffs at Julesburg, on the other hand, is a record of Leutze’s response to topographical and meteorological phenomena that were neither imaginary nor conventional. At the right, a towering thunderhead is illuminated by the setting sun, while a gigantic storm lowers to the left. The moonscape bluffs are bathed in an ocherous glow.          

Leutze’s coloristic talent was insufficient fully to express the impact of the storm he had witnessed, and his ominous darkness resembles brown soup. However, in the striking foreground figures, his painting is memorable. The panicked horses are drawn with a sketchy energy, their relative flatness redeemed by his brushwork’s nervous intensity and vigor. Although Leutze executed the painting after his return to his Washington, D.C., studio, he must have based it on sketches done on the spot. Uneven though it is, the painting seems a spontaneous, even awestruck, response to violent natural phenomena, and it has a directness rarely if ever encountered elsewhere in the formal art of this very studio-centered painter.

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.