The Falls of St Anthony

The Falls of St. Anthony by Albert Bierstadt

A broad line of white water stretches across the middle distance, with wooded islands and a sunlit river below. In Albert Bierstadt's The Falls of St. Anthony, small foreground figures occupy a place to pause and look, while the waterfall supplies the scene's principal movement.

The Carmen Thyssen Collection dates the oil on canvas to about 1880–1887. It measures 96.8 × 153.7 cm, inventory CTB.1980.8.^[1] Its subject is the Mississippi River at what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota.

At more than a metre and a half wide, the canvas gives considerable room to the river's lateral movement. Its size helps explain why the falls can remain in the middle distance while still holding the composition together. The people and trees provide a nearer scale against which that broad reach of water can be judged.

Water across a wide canvas

The falls extend laterally rather than forming one narrow torrent. Separate white passages descend between darker interruptions, spreading the action across the scene. Pale mist softens their bases. Below, the river is broken by small crests, rocks and irregular reflections, so the movement continues towards the viewer.

Trees fill the left edge, with branches reaching into the sky. Their dark trunks and foliage provide a near screen through which the more distant water can be seen. At the bottom, a projecting rock offers a stable platform above the shifting surface. The small standing figure on it becomes conspicuous because his dark outline crosses the brighter river.

Other figures gather beneath the trees, and a narrow canoe lies out on the water. These presences keep the scene from becoming an empty landscape. Their small scale directs attention towards the falls without erasing the people who occupy the foreground.

Beyond the waterfall, the horizon stays low beneath a comparatively open sky. Warm light joins the water, mist and wooded islands. The nearer trunks remain dark, giving that distant glow a clear contrast.

A historical landscape imagined later

Elizabeth Garrity Ellis's museum essay interprets the painting as an imagined earlier landscape, contrasting it with the Minneapolis development already surrounding the falls during Bierstadt's lifetime. She relates its golden atmosphere and framing trees to the Claudian landscape tradition.^[1] This reading helps explain the lack of visible urban industry; it does not make the painting a surveyed record of a particular year.

The museum discusses the standing European figure as a possible representation of Louis Hennepin, while leaving the identification unresolved.^[1] The National Park Service records Hennepin's encounter with the falls in July 1680 and his naming them for his patron saint. It also records that the Dakota already knew them as Owahmenah, or falling water.^[2] Calling the falls simply his “discovery” would obscure that earlier knowledge.

The foreground figures can therefore be considered alongside the picture's historical framing, but their exact identities and relationships should not be invented. Neither the canoe nor the seated group supplies a complete account of the encounter.

Dakota homeland and the meaning of a named place

The Minnesota Historical Society identifies Owamniyomni, St. Anthony Falls, as a place of spiritual power and a gathering place in Dakota homeland. Its riverfront history connects the falls with resources including Nicollet Island's sugar maples and nearby springs. It also places them within a wider culturally significant landscape that includes Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers.^[3]

This history gives the riverbank a significance beyond its role as a foreground. Water, trees and islands belong to a place known through use and cultural relationships. The people in Bierstadt's picture should not be assigned particular names or activities without evidence, but neither should their small size encourage the idea that they are incidental to an otherwise uninhabited landscape.

Hennepin's European name and the Dakota names convey different histories of recognition. Retaining the familiar painting title need not make his arrival the beginning of the place's history. The uncertainty surrounding the standing figure is therefore meaningful: the composition offers a position from which to contemplate the falls, while its historical interpretation raises questions about who is doing that looking.

The industrial falls during the painting's period

The Minnesota Historical Society's timeline makes the contrast with Bierstadt's view concrete. Waterpower companies constructed a V-shaped dam in 1856–1858. A tunnel collapse threatened the falls in 1869, followed by Army Corps of Engineers works between 1870 and 1884. The rebuilt Washburn A Mill opened in 1880, the Pillsbury A Mill in 1881 and the Stone Arch Bridge in 1883.^[4] These events overlap or precede the painting's approximate date.

The picture offers no corresponding panorama of mills, canals or railways. Its trees, islands and open horizon produce a different experience of the river. The contrast supports Ellis's reading of an imagined earlier landscape, but it does not establish which industrial structure Bierstadt consciously removed, or provide a year that his scene is meant to represent.

The changes involved the waterfall itself as well as its surroundings. Historian John O. Anfinson explains how tunnelling through soft sandstone beneath a limestone cap helped precipitate the 1869 collapse. Engineers later built a wall beneath the river and completed a protective apron in 1880, replacing the natural drop with an inclined engineered surface.^[5]

Against that account, the irregular white passages in Bierstadt's painting become especially significant. They break over separate edges and move around wooded interruptions. The scene preserves an image of varied, unruly water rather than presenting the river as an orderly power supply. That reading concerns the painted effect and the documented history together; it does not turn the canvas into a technical reconstruction of the original falls.

Another view of the riverfront

Anfinson's article reproduces a view captioned as the milling districts at the falls in 1870, with Minneapolis on one side and St. Anthony on the other. Its river is bordered by rows of buildings, while islands remain in the foreground.^[5] Looking at that illustration beside Bierstadt's composition helps distinguish the site from the painter's chosen presentation of it.

There is a shared broad reach of river, but the built shoreline makes the historical view read as an occupied working place. Bierstadt directs attention instead towards the falls and the leafy bank where the figures gather. The comparison does not prove he knew or used this particular image. It makes the difference between his wooded prospect and the documented industrial riverfront visible.

Catlin and two ways of picturing the falls

George Catlin also returned to this subject. The Thyssen museum dates its The Falls of Saint Anthony to 1871 and identifies oil on cardboard, 46 × 63.5 cm. Paloma Alarcó's essay connects the subject to Catlin's 1835 visit and later repetitions, distinguishing the finished painting's date from that earlier encounter. She contrasts Catlin's distant panoramic approach with Bierstadt's more dramatic treatment.^[6]

The pairing is useful because it concerns the same named place, rather than two waterfalls chosen merely for their resemblance. Yet Catlin's later version should not be treated as an untouched snapshot of 1835. Both dates and the histories of making matter when a landscape is used as evidence of a lost scene. Alarcó's comparison offers a way to discuss different representational approaches without claiming that Bierstadt copied this particular Catlin painting.

Following water across the composition

Compare the broad flow with the upright waterfall in Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall. Here, the eye travels across a river; there, two falls lead it up a granite wall. Each composition makes its small human figures a measure of a much larger landscape.