Das Illustrirte Mississippithal, dargestellt in 80 nach der Natur aufgenommenen Ansichten vom Wasserfalle zu St. Anthony an bis zum Golf von Mexico

Düsseldorf: Verlag des lithographischen Institut von Arnz and Comp, 1858. 4to. (11 x 7 1/2 inches). First edition. [2] [1]-431 [1]. 434 pp. 80 lithograph plates printed in colour (including pictorial half title page and double page plate of New Orleans counted as 2 plates) with hand-colouring and printed titles in English and German, tinted pictorial lithograph half-title, 1 folding color lithograph of New Orleans, 1 woodcut illustration. Text in German black letter set in borders. Publisher's printed paper boards skillfully re-backed to style.

"One of the half-dozen great and rare illustrated books relating to North America." [Graff] The excessive (truncated) rarity and startling beauty of this color-lithographed guidebook to the whole of the Mississippi have "combined to make it a collector's prize eagerly searched for." [Heilbron]

"The dramatic scenery of the Mississippi Valley has never been better portrayed than by Henry Lewis." [Heilbron] Lewis, an English-born cabinetmaker whose family emigrated to the US when he was ten, arrived in St. Louis in 1836. He was a self-taught painter but by the mid-1840s he had gained local repute as a "landscape painter of more than ordinary merit." Encouraged by a local newspaper editor, Lewis embarked upon a grand venture, painting a thousand-foot panorama of the Mississippi River. With financial assistance from friends he made a number of sketching trips in 1846, 1847, and 1848, before he began painting the panorama itself in 1848. His "Great National Work" was first viewed in St. Louis the following year. The panorama, which Lewis's promoters claimed cost $15,000, was well received. Lewis toured the major cities of the United States and Canada with the painting and in 1851 began a tour of Europe. Interest in the panorama waned and by 1853 Lewis had settled in Düsseldorf, where he sold the panorama for $4,000 to a "wealthy planter from the island of Java, a Hollander by birth." Its subsequent history is unknown. The present work appear to have resulted from Lewis's wish to make use of the numerous sketches and watercolors that he made on his river trips, but there is evidence that he had been talking to the publishers, Arnz and Coms., as early as 1848 about the possibility of publishing a book: "Arrang[e]ment with Mr Arst [Arnz] for a work on the Mississippi." [Lewis's journal of 1848] The trickle of immigrants from Europe in general and Germany in particular had become a stream. It is evident that both Lewis and his publishers felt there would be a ready market for a work which graphically displayed, for the benefit of immigrants, the beauties of the Mississippi, its cities, towns, and landscapes. While Lewis's written observations are also of interest, it is his depictions of the Valley of the Mississippi at midcentury that are remarkable. "This book is famous for its colored plates of places and scenes along the Mississippi in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. These include views of such well-known cities as St. Louis, St. Paul, Dubuque, Burlington, Keokuk, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and Baton Rouge. At the end is a magnificent folding plate of New Orleans." [Streeter] Indeed, the Lewis plates are the best series of Western city-views published prior to the Civil War, and they are a superb source for early images of life on the Mississippi. Lewis's work was originally issued in twenty parts. In the early numbers, there were English and German issues of the plates, and copies appear in both variant forms. This copy has page 72 in the first state, without the text describing "Das Medizinflaschendorf." The plate count of eighty called for by the title is arrived at by including the half-title as one plate and the superb folding New Orleans view as two. Rare in printed boards. The Martin-Park-Snider copy sold for $168,000 in 2005.

Buck 589. Clark III, 345. Deak 552. Flak, Mormon Bibliography. Graff 2474. Heilbron, The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated, pp.15-16. Howes L312 ("dd" highest scarcity). Jones 1376. Littell 642. Miles and Reese, America Pictured to the Life 15. OCLC 1670313. Rader 227. Reps, Views and Viewmakers 29. Sabin 40807. Streeter sale 1547. (Inventory #: 41675)