The Maximilian zu Wied–Karl Bodmer Collection at Joslyn Art Museum is an exceptional record of Indigenous and Euro-American life, culture, and trade along the Missouri River in the early nineteenth-century. Preserved at the Museum’s Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies, it consists of a great number of visual and textual items, including 269 watercolor paintings, 117 drawings, and more than 200 North American prints by Bodmer, as well as the original copper printing plates used by the artist to create illustrations for Maximilian’s travel account. The collection also contains Maximilian’s original travel diaries through North America, his correspondence during and after the trip, as well as ephemera gathered on the way (calling cards, bills and receipts, advertisements…).

These documents and artworks originate directly from Neuwied Castle, in present-day Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. While Maximilian’s Native American objects were sold to the Royal Cabinet of Prussia (Berlin) and the future Linden Museum (Stuttgart) in the nineteenth century, the remainder of his collection remained undisturbed until descendants allowed historian Josef Röder (1914–1975) to conduct research in Neuwied’s archive in 1948. Fascinated by this trove of material, Röder displayed a number of Bodmer’s rediscovered American watercolors at the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum in 1952, before touring 116 of them in the United States between 1953 and 1958. After the exhibit closed, art dealer William Davidson (1905–1973), acting for the New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., purchased the Neuwied collection from its last owner, Friedrich Wilhelm, 7th Prince zu Wied (1931–2000).

Informed of the transaction, Joslyn Art Museum director Eugene Kingman (1909–1975) and board member John F. Merriam (1904–1988) encouraged the Omaha-based Northern Natural Gas Company (NNG), to acquire the collection from Knoedler. At the same time chairman of NNG, Merriam helped the company finalize the purchase in July 1962, whereupon the Neuwied collection was placed on permanent loan at the Joslyn. Over the next two decades, Bodmer’s stunning watercolors were presented to the public in the museum’s permanent galleries and toured in multiple shows. Following the creation of the Durham Center for Western Studies at the Joslyn in 1980, Bodmer’s drawn and painted views were inventoried in the landmark book Karl Bodmer’s America (1984). Two years later, in 1986, NNG formally gifted the entire Maximilian–Bodmer collection to the Joslyn.

Since then, the museum has led a number of initiatives to study and publicize the collection, including the volume Karl Bodmer’s North American Prints (2004), and the translation and critical edition of Maximilian’s travel journals in three parts (2008-12). The exhibition Faces from the Interior: The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer (2020) was accompanied by a catalog and four short films featuring the perspectives of Indigenous artistic and knowledge bearers on the legacy of Maximilian and Bodmer. “The Natural Face of North America” follows comparable goals: to expand the interpretation of the Maximilian–Bodmer corpus, foreground Indigenous voices, and offer new perspectives on the past and future of the shifting landscapes of the American Interior.