Paulus Roetter

Paulus Roetter (Paulus Rötter) (4 January/July 1806 Nuremberg - 11 November 1894 St. Louis), was the son of a Lutheran minister. He became a prominent biological and anatomical artist at Harvard and Washington University, a landscape painter and botanical illustrator.

Roetter attended art classes in Düsseldorf, Munich and Nuremberg, working briefly in Paris, and in 1825 settled at Thun and Interlaken in Switzerland. Here he became a well-known landscape painter, teaching in various schools for some twenty years. He married Sophia Berner (1809-1841) and had 3 children.

Having become involved in the church, he emigrated to the United States in 1845 accompanied by family and friends, intending to found a religious settlement. For various reasons the project failed and Roetter established himself in St. Louis, becoming an art teacher at Central High School and pastor at St. Mark's Evangelical Church from 1845-1853.

In the US census of 1850 for St. Louis, Roetter is listed as being 44 years old, with his second wife Anna Muehleman 25 years old, and children Arnold (15), Gert (12), Anna (9), Lydia (4), Salome (2), and twins of 2 months. They were further recorded as lodging with a tailor named Albert Sanderloper, aged 40, also born in Germany.

With the founding of Washington University on 22 February 1853, Roetter became a faculty member, teaching modern languages and drawing at a salary of $500 per year. Here he met up with another German American George Engelmann, a physician and botanist and advisor to Henry Shaw on the planning of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Through Engelmann Roetter became interested in natural history, and produced a large number of drawings of biological specimens. Some of Roetter's original drawings are in Shaw's Museum and "recognized by authorities as being among the finest ever made."

In 1853-1854 Roetter accompanied a government expedition that explored the region from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, making detailed drawings of natural history specimens. The aim of the expedition was to find a workable railroad passage from the Mississippi to the West Coast.

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