Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), April 5, 1845, vol. 1, no. 14, p. ??

[page 221, column 1, continued:]

MAGNIFICENT BOOKS.

Two or three copies of the “Travels in the Interior of North America, by Maximilian Prince of Wied,” have been received by our foreign-book-sellers. It is one of the moat superbly illustrated volumes of modern times. The letterpress is copiously illustrated by fine wood cuts, but the real illustrations consist of a portfolio of eighty-one colored plates, of imperial folio size. The engravings are executed in line, and colored, from pictures by M. Bodmer, an accomplished artist who travelled in company with the Prince. This great work was published simultaneously in England, France and Germany. The English plates are said to be superior in coloring to the others, and are sold at a less price.

Prince Maximilian landed in Boston in July, 1832, and after spending few days in that city he proceeded west, stopping a short time in New York and Philadelphia, and making a prolonged visit to the German-Moravian settlement at Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, where M. Bodmer began to exercise his pencil. The greater part of the plates are representations of Indian life; they have all the truthfulness of the sketches by Mr. Catlin, but in a style of art greatly superior to his drawings Many of the landscapes are beautiful pictures, which have the appearance of original water-color paintings. The subscription price of the work in Paris was 850 frances; but a great many copies must have been sold to defray the cost of publication even at that price.

The travels of the Prince would doubtless be much better known, had they been published in a less magnificent manner. it must be gratifying to an author to see his book elegantly illustrated, but it would be better for his reputation that it should be published without pictures, than to have them of so high character as to overshadow his book altogether. Those who are able to purchase works like this of Prince Maximilian's are the kind of people who do the least to give currency to an author's name. One of the plates gives a full-length portrait of the Prince, whose appearance corresponds very much with the idea which we conceived of him from reading his travels. He is, apparently, a good-natured gentleman of about forty-live years, with an honest Dutch face, light hair, broad shoulders, and five feet in stature. [column 2:] He wears a shooting jacket, has a gun in his hand, a cap on his head, and gold-mounted spectacles on his nose. Surrounded by wild-looking Indians, as he is represented, the Prince has a remarkably tame but good-fellow look.

His stay in New York was too brief to allow him to make finny comments upon our city: but he did not fail to notice that “it has one remarkably fine street called Broadway. which has an uninterrupted line of shops but little inferior to those of London or Paris.”

——

Bartlett & Welford have a copy or two of Catlin's Indian Portfolio, consisting of 25 colored lithographed plates, in the highest style of art. As portraits they are, perhaps, more valuable than the drawings of Mr. Bodmer which accompany the travels of Prince Maximilian, but they cannot be ranked together as artistic productions. One of the most touching and apparently most truthful of the sketch. es, although from the nature of the subject it must he a purely imaginative painting, is the representation of a wounded buffalo attacked by a herd of white wolves. The time is not very distant when these illustrated works will possess a deeper interest than they do at pre-sent — when they will be almost the only vestiges left of the original inhabitants of our soil. An English magazine, in noticing Mr. Cat-lin's Portfolio, expresses a fear that mankind will reward him with little more than empty praise for his labors. But we trust that he will receive front his own countrymen something more than empty praise, though as yet he has had from them but a small quantity of even that easily bestowed commodity.