John Ross Key's world's fair paintings

Apparently Key had undertaken this project on a freelance basis, but the huge paintings soon found a home. The State of Illinois secured them for exhibition in a specially built annex next to the Illinois Building at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, which opened in Omaha on June 1, 1898. If Key's original plan had been to impress Parisians with the glories of the Chicago fair, it found partial fulfillment at the Omaha exposition. These paintings disappeared after the close of the fair and have not been located. (8) The six other paintings in the projected series were never executed.

Although preceded by lesser fairs in San Francisco and Saint Louis, the Omaha exposition was the next major world's fair to be held after the World's Columbian Exposition. The idea behind it was to celebrate the progress of commerce and culture in the states west of the Mississippi River. After some discussion, the planners decided to follow the Chicago model with all the major buildings designed in the beaux arts style, but they stipulated that the architects be from western states. Another distinctive feature in Omaha was to connect the buildings with colonnades. Otherwise the Omaha fair was a smaller version of the Chicago exposition, with imposing buildings surrounded by lawns and waterways. A midway, similar to Chicago's, was the site of beer halls, restaurants, and ethnic exhibits. A giant seesaw took the place of the Ferris wheel that had been a symbol of the Chicago fair. (9)

By August Key was in Omaha painting views of the fair. His depiction of the Grand Court, Omaha's version of the Chicago Court of Honor, was presented to President William McKinley (1843-1901) by the fair's manager, Edward Rosewater (1841-1906). A similar work by Key that was exhibited at the Whitmore Gallery in downtown Omaha evoked the following encomium from a reporter from the Omaha Evening Bee: "Every detail of the architecture, the decorations and landscapes is perfectly reproduced and the crowd seems almost alive, so accurately has the artist caught the inspiration of the moving panorama." (10) Key's Trans-Mississippi View--Daylight (Durham Western Heritage Museum, Omaha) demonstrates these qualities. It depicts the United States Government Building on the western side of the court, its pediment surmounted by a version of the flamboyant statue Liberty Enlightening the World.

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By August 1898 Key had contracted with the Taber Prang Art Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, to provide paintings of the Omaha fair that would be made into chromolithographs. Six were eventually published, one of which portrays a campground of tepees from the Indian Congress (Pl. V), (11) a mingling of various western tribes brought to Omaha with the assistance of a forty thousand dollar government grant. James Mooney (1861-1921), an ethnologist, was appointed director of the congress, and the hope was that the Indians would display many traditional customs and crafts that were rapidly being lost in the modern world. Mooney became frustrated when promoters paid the Indians to stage reenactments of battles for the entertainment of the fairgoers.