Rudolf Cronau (1855-1939)

Rudolf Cronau (1855-1939)

Collotypes mounted on title boards

from Von Wunderland zu Wunderland 

Approx. paper size: 17½ by 12 in.

Leipzig, T.O. Weigel, 1886

The Prussian-born Rudolf Cronau was sent to the United States in 1880 by the German newspaper Die Gartenlaube on an assignment to document the views and natives of the American frontier. Cronau, a newspaper correspondent working in Germany, had also been formally trained at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf.

For the newspaper, he wrote a series of articles and accompanied them with detailed pen and ink drawings. Six years later after his return to Germany, a two-volume set of collotypes based on a handful of his drawings was published. Von Wunderland zu Wunderland contains a total of fifty collotypes depicting landscapes and city views throughout the Unites States as well as portraits of Native Americans and cowboys Cronau had encountered during his travels. While Cronau was not the first European to move westward for the sake of documenting American life, his views and portraits are accurate and wonderfully artistic 

representations of the subject, and even include the first life portrait of the famed Sitting Bull.