In celebration of the mountain men and an artist who captured them on a grand scale, David and Susan Jo Berwen have produced a book that is both beautiful and historically interesting. There are actually two veins of history running through the book. The first is the history of the nearly eighty-foot-long Rendezvous Murals, created and installed by Carl Roters at the Jackson Lake Lodge in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. The second is an essay about the Western fur-trapping era, with biographies of important trappers and traders, written by historians Fred R. Gowans, professor emeritus, Brigham Young University and Brenda D. Francis.
The main focus of the book is the work of Carl Roters and the story behind his creation of the Rendezvous Murals. For two years, beginning in 1957, Roters devoted himself to one of the most important mural commissions granted in the Western United States. Commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., these murals cover two walls of the dining room of the Jackson Lake Lodge and depict four scenes leading up to and including the 1837 rendezvous. How these amazing murals came to be is a story of resourcefulness, single-mindedness and artistic genius.
“The physical and technical challenges of producing the Rendezvous Murals were immense,” explain the authors. Roters, whose studio was in the basement of a two-family house in Syracuse, New York, had to cut away part of the floor above to create an eighteen-foot-high space to accommodate the murals. He also needed to build a ground-level entrance to his studio to move materials in and out. This meant commandeering his eight-year-old son to remove hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of dirt. He insisted his children help in other ways as well. They undertook the tedious tasks of grinding pigment; preparing, applying and sanding the gesso on the scenic panels; and cleaning the studio each night so that the mountains of gesso dust didn’t stick to the works in progress.
In addition to the color-perfect reproductions of the murals, the book contains many of Roters’ preliminary sketches, plus pages from his notebook that reveal the attention he paid to every detail of the project. The book also features examples of Roters’ other paintings. It is a beautiful artbook presented in a coffee-table size format.
Carl Roters and the Rendezvous Murals is available online at <www.carlroters.com>, by phone at 800-345-6665, by fax at 603-357-2073 or by email at <order@pathwaybook.com>.