Henry Lewis
American, 1819–1904
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"Professor" Henry Lewis was a British-born, self-taught American artist and showman, best known for his paintings of the American West.
He was born in Newport or Scarborough, Kent County, England, on January 12, 1819. His family immigrated about 1833 to Boston, Massachusetts, where he was apprenticed to a carpenter. At age seventeen, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as a carpenter and scenery painter at the St. Louis Theatre.
Between 1846 and 1848, he sketched and painted hundreds of scenes of the Mississippi River. These included rare views, such as the Mormon Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois (burned 1848), and the great St. Louis Fire of 1849.
He developed his sketches into a giant moving panorama – 12 feet by 1,300 feet – which was unrolled, with music and narration, before theater audiences in the United States and Europe.
He settled in Germany in 1854, and published a book with eighty illustrations based on his panorama: The Illustrated Mississippi: From the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico (1857). He died in 1904 in Düsseldorf, Germany.