View of the Midwest Plains

French artist Auguste Bartholdi is best known for designing the Statue of Liberty, a gfit from France to the United States in 1886, symbolic of freedom. He also maintained a watercolor practice throughout his career, and created a series of landscapes directly from nature while traveling across the United States in 1871 to identify a potential site for the Statue of Liberty. Here, Bartholdi depicts two figures riding horses before a landscape punctuated by distant buttes, suggesting the freedom he saw as characteristic of the United States.