Education
Born in England, his family emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts when he was ten, where he was apprenticed to a carpenter.
Born in England, his family emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts when he was ten, where he was apprenticed to a carpenter.
At age seventeen, he moved to Saint Louis, Missouri where he worked as a carpenter and scenery painter at the Saint Louis Theatre. Between 1846 and 1848, he sketched and painted hundreds of scenes of the Mississippi River. These included rare views, such as the Morman Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois (burned 1848).
And the great Saint 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 Saint Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico (1857).
He died in Dusseldorf, Germany.