Gustav Johann Grunewald

In July of 1831, Grunewald married fellow Gnadau Moravian, Maria Justina Lehman, and the couple moved to Bethlehem four months later.

The pair was officially admitted to the closed community of Bethlehem sixteen months later, in March of 1833, when they reapplied for membership and they purchased their own home, the Roder House, in December of 1836.

"Niagara from the Foot of American Falls" and "Table Rock, Niagara," together known as Niagara Falls, are widely considered to be the first great works completed by Grunewald during his time in the United States. 

Niagara Falls became a motif frequently used by Grunewald in his later works, with eleven variants of the original pair of paintings being produced between 1841 and 1854.

Though Grunewald traveled as far as Niagara to capture the beauty and might of natural sites and phenomena, he was just as enamored with those he found closer to his home. The most notable of these local sites depicted by Grunewald was the Delaware Water Gap.

This landscape, titled Delaware Water Gap, was commissioned in 1835 by Charles F. Seidel, then principal of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, as an outgoing gift to the school.

Though Grunewald’s paintings of Niagara remain the most well-known of his depictions of waterfalls, he also discovered subject matter and inspiration in the forms of the waterfalls found in the Pocono Mountains.

The waterfalls depicted by Grunewald in these paintings remain unidentified, though they likely take inspiration from sites such as the Bushkill Falls and Dingmans Falls.

In his paintings, Grunewald exaggerated the size of these waterfalls to make them appear to be on an equitable scale to the famed Niagara Falls.

Similar to Niagara Falls, the sites which inspired the paintings "Pennsylvania Falls" and "Waterfall and Cascade" became recurring subjects in Grunewald’s work.

After moving to Bethlehem, Grunewald took a position as an Instructor of Art at the Bethlehem Female Seminary (a historical predecessor to Moravian University) where he taught basic, intermediate, and advanced levels of drawing and painting.

In 1836, Gustav Grunewald was appointed Drawing Master of the Bethlehem Female Seminary, a title he retained until his retirement in 1866. Although Grunewald spent most of his life as a teacher in Bethlehem, he also gave private lessons to students as far away as New York City.

The township of Bear Creek, located southeast of the city of Wilkes-Barre, was made accessible to Pennsylvanians living in the Lehigh Valley for the first time via an extension to the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad that connected the mainline rail to Bear Creek Village. 

Grunewald, who frequented this rail line, captured the unfortunate, recurring phenomenon of forest fires in the region following the advent of steam engine transportation in his "Scene in Bear Creek, Woods on Fire," seen here.