Godfrey Nicholas FRANKENSTEIN
1820–1873, Germany/USA

Godfrey Nicolas Frankenstein was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1820, and emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1831 with his family. Subsequently the family moved to Springfield, Ohio in 1849. The Frankenstein family was a gifted group of German immigrant artists that included John Peter (1816-1881), Godfrey N. (1820-1873), George (1825-), Gustavus (-1902), Marie (1822-1900 and Eliza (1828-1919. Godfrey Frankenstein opened his own business when he was 13 years old as a sign painter and at 19 was a portrait painter. In 1841 he became the first president of the Cincinnati Academy of Arts. He soon became interested in landscape painting, especially the Niagara Falls, which he began painting in 1844. Working at Niagara over the next eight years, he did about one-hundred easel paintings of the Falls, as well as a spectacular panorama. Nineteen of these views were reproduced in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in August, 1853. In conjunction with the unveiling of his panorama, Niagara, in Philadelphia, he was named "The Painter of Niagara Falls". Niagara became one of the most celebrated of its genre, combining spectacular scenery and nationalistic appeal, and it inspired half a dozen successors during the 1850's, possibly providing the inspiration for Frederic Edwin Church's great panoramic easel painting of the Falls in 1857. Godfrey finished the panorama, on a strip of canvas 1,000 feet long, nine feet high, and rolled from one wooden spindle to another, with the help of his brothers and sister Eliza, who arranged the paintings systematically and incorporated them into a regular series. It was first exhibited in the old City Hall in Springfield, Ohio, where the family had moved in 1849, before being started on a tour around the country. It is now lost; it may have been stored in Black's Opera House in Springfield, which was destroyed by fire in 1903.

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