French author and historian Claudine Chalmers still remembers being sent from France to California as an exchange student when she was around 16 years old.
“That, to me, became adventure, full-force adventure. I was never the same after that,” she said.
She soon learned about the story of two French artists – Jules Tavernier and Paul Frenzeny – who visited the Western Frontier for the first time in the 1870s when there was such a rush of settlers heading that direction. She felt like she could empathize with them.
“I just could anticipate almost what they felt when they discovered this new continent, this new country, and this incredible moment in the history of the United States,” she said.
That led Chalmers to research more about the artists’ work and write Chronicling The West For Harper’s: Coast To Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 2013. Now, she curated an exhibit with their work at the Greeley History Museum that opens this month.
Tavernier and Frenzeny had recently moved from France in the late 1800s and started making art for Harper’s Weekly in New York. Their work was so exceptional that the magazine decided to send them on a cross-country trip.
“How could they resist?” Chalmers said. “They were well paid on top of it.”
Tavernier would paint what he saw first. He was good at seeing the light, perspective and volumes – all the things he learned about in art school. Then Frenzeny would do a black and white engraving on a piece of wood, adding in the smaller details, like the dust and cattle. He was trained at a military school where he drew lots of maps.
“It increased the beauty of the sketch,” Chalmers said. “It was really a good way to cooperate to create an illustration that was extremely rich in both the style and the information.”
Those wood engravings were done in reverse using a mirror. Chalmers said that allowed the artists to keep the painting and send the engraving back to the offices at Harper’s.
“One of the many engravers that worked in the offices would carefully dig out the wood and leave only the outlines,” Chalmers said. “And then that would be used to print the newspaper.”
Their journey was long and uncomfortable, trekking through the West with all their luggage, art supplies, and Frenzeny’s dog, Judy (Chalmers said he wouldn’t have done the trip without her). They camped in a tent when they couldn’t stop in a boom town, and they traveled by horse-drawn covered wagons and trains.
“Those trains took forever,” Chalmers said. “They were stuck on the trains in terrible heat for long, long hours, sometimes several days.”
They also encountered powerful tornadoes and thunderstorms.
“For them to meet with these type of violent weather on their way, it must have been more than spectacular,” Chalmers said. “It must have been scary.”
But Chalmers said they were curious, excited and astonished by what they saw. They were captivated by the pristine and empty nature of the West in the late 1800s, sketching how people could go and write their name on a map in the land office to get some acres. They were also amazed by the ingenuity of the settlers at the time.
“When they were going through Kansas, they discovered underground cities, and that's because there were so many tornadoes, so much wind, that the villages were actually dug down,” Chalmers said. “All you see on one of their sketches is the signs which tell you where to go down underground.”
Their journey took a year in total. They made 100 sketches – a handful of which will be at the exhibit in Greeley.
A good chunk of their artwork was done in Colorado, where they chose to winter. Tavernier spent some time in Denver after meeting a talented chef. Frenzeny, on the other hand, was fascinated by the silver and gold mines and the smelting in the western part of the state.
Chalmers said their work captures the West in an authentic way.
“It's one-of-a-kind vision of the Frontier in its most transformative moment,” she said. “It's all accurate. It's exactly the way they saw it.”
A Great Frontier Odyssey: Sketching The American West is open through late May.
