View of Bethlehem, from Monocacy Bridge

"Grunewald married Maria Justina Lehman in July 1831. Nine years his senior and a native of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, she was also a member of the Moravian colony at Gnadau, the city of Grunewald's birth to which the artist had returned to work. The couple's arrival in the United States was recorded four months later when they presented themselves to the closed community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On their arrival, the Grunewalds were recorded as "Ausgeschlossene," excluded ones, but were ultimately admitted to the congregation in Bethlehem upon reapplication in March 1833. That they were admitted without delay sixteen months after their arrival suggests that the nature of their exclusion could not have been serious. It may explain their apparently precipitate immigration so soon after marriage that ignored customs of the controlled economy in Bethlehem. It should be said that the Aufseher Collegium, which conducted the business of the Moravian community in Bethlehem as the functional counterpart to the ecclesiastical Conference of Elders, complained that immigrants arriving without letters of introduction was not uncommon. The same minutes of 1831 that permitted Grunewald and his wife to rent a dwelling place only for the winter of their arrival expressed the Collegium's "wish that appropriate reminder might be made so that in the future the Brethren and Sisters who come here from Europe are provided with a proper recommendation from a worker in their town."

The City of Bethlehem at this time was running on the energy generated by missionary zeal in the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth century. The 1830s and 1840s were perhaps the period of greatest insularity for the city, in which every aspect of the economy and community life was carefully controlled by the church. The town of about one thousand residents had passed from a phase of development in which its public works and urban progress were considered exemplary by visitors from all over the young Republic, to a time when its population growth and industry had all but stagnated.

It is unclear where the Grunewalds took up permanent residence in the United States after being received for the winter of 1831–1832 in Bethlehem. Presumably for at least part of the period 1832 to 1834, the couple lived in Bethlehem, and for a part of the time in Philadelphia.”

“. . . We may conclude that our artist was integrated into the life of the Moravian community in Bethlehem in many practical ways: provider of religious imagery; teacher of drawing and painting; maker of patterns for needlework; supplier of picture frames; portrait painter; and . . . photographer. Quite independent of his work for the Moravians, Gustav Grunewald had an extensive career that figured in the larger American art world of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Only months after arriving in the United States he exhibited a painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1836 he began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York.”

From: Blume, Peter F. "Gustav Grunewald 1805–1878." Allentown Art Museum Publication, 1992. Pages 6 and 14.