Public data from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Learn more
View of the Midwest Plains
About the Artwork
French artist Auguste Bartholdi is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty, a gfit from France to the United States in 1886, symbolic of freedom. He also maintained a watercolor practice throughout his career, and created a series of landscapes directly from nature while traveling across the United States in 1871 to identify a potential site for the Statue of Liberty. Here, Bartholdi depicts two figures riding horses before a landscape punctuated by distant buttes, suggesting the freedom he saw as characteristic of the United States.
Provenance
?–2020: (Galerie Mazarini, Lyon, France, sold to private collection) 2020–25: Private Collection, France ?–2025: (Ambroise Duchemin, Paris, France, sold to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) June 9, 2025–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (French, 1834–1904)
- Date
- c. 1871
- Medium
- watercolor, graphite, ink wash, and gouache on paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 13 x 21 cm (5 1/8 x 8 1/4 in.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- James Parmelee Fund
- Accession no.
- 2025.146
More by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi in museum collections
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Open-access museum record · AT-00011364
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