Henry Lewis

Who was Henry Lewis?

"Professor" Henry Lewis was a self-taught American artist and showman, best known for his paintings of the American West.

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 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 Morman Temple at Nauvoo, Illinois; 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.

He died in Dusseldorf, Germany.